Keith Devens .com

The danger of reporting on technical subjects by non-technical reporters, for consumption by non-technical (at least in this subject area) readers:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/200...of-everything-severely-deficient.html

The problem is that Lisi has ignored much of physics, where he adds normal numbers to vectors and other similar no-nos (imagine adding a speed to an energy and you have got exactly what Lisi has done). He has found that the chosen symmetry operations correspond to the symmetry groups of particles—not that surprising, considering the number of symmetry operations he has at his disposal—but he hasn't checked to see if the masses come out as found experimentally because he can't; once you put nonsense into a model, the only thing that comes out is nonsense.

In the Observatory thread on this topic, posters have pointed to a blog article that puts Lisi firmly in the crank category, which is exactly right. However, New Scientist has to take a good chunk of the blame here by taking something that any good particle physicist can recognize as complete rubbish (it fooled me until I started to look at what his equations actually meant) and turned it (and Lisi) into an anti-establishment star (he's a surfer, not a scientist...).

Too bad. Thanks for the comment.