Reply #78: Fascinating and worth following

[Mike03]

If Lee Smolin is interested, I'm interested; although, Lee Smolin encourages all sorts of theories, especially Loop Quantum Gravity.

My only comments are that E8 supergravity is old but, as String Theory was in 1985, it is not well enough understood yet, but holds great potential. Lisi seems to be suggesting that the unknown particle parameters of the Standard Model (or beyond it) are not superpartners but the result of some unknown force entirely. The reason this is possible is that there are potentially degrees of freedom for particles that are not well understood and are not accounted for in the Standard Model. That is possible, but they also must have remarkably large masses not to have been discovered by the Tevatron. If this is so, why does he not classify them as superpartners? There is not enough info in the article to understand what he is arguing. Are they zero mass particles assigned a mass--and if so, by what force?

Could he be talking about extended Technicolor models, in which something other than the Higgs Field is responsible for the masses of the additional generations?

Other theories are desperately needed now, as String Theory draws closer and closer to the abyss of indeciperhability.