An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything

Garrett Lisi, surfer guy and physicist extraordinaire, thinks he has a better theory of everything: wrapping up gravity, the general theory of relativity and the standard model of particle physics into one model he describes as “Exceptionally Simple.” I read his abstract, and don’t have a clue what the fuck it’s talking about, but it is pretty cool he was able to raise a hell of a lot of establishment eyebrows while being an outsider... as well as come up with an apparently plausible theory that doesn’t require extra dimensions beyond 1 of time and 3 of space (although he needed a 248 dimensional model to do it). Anyway, some folks are saying this might be bullshit, or at least not very useful, but it’s pretty and has successfully distracted me from what I'm supposed to be doing right now.

Gorgeous Animations:
http://deferentialgeometry.org/anim/

Articles:
http://www.newscientist.com/...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/e...

Update

There's a better explanation of this model at Slashdot.

I also found a nice video from New Scientist.