Log24

One approach to the storied philosophers' stone, that of Jim Dodge in Stone Junction , was sketched in yesterday's Easter post. Dodge described a mystical "spherical diamond." The symmetries of the sphere form what is called in mathematics a Lie group . The "spherical" of Dodge therefore suggests a review of the Lie group E₈  in Garrett Lisi's poetic theory of everything.

A check of the Wikipedia article on Lisi's theory yields…

       Diamond and E₈ at Wikipedia

Related material — E₈  as "a diamond with thousands of facets"—

Also from the New Yorker  article—

“There’s a dream that underlying the physical universe is some beautiful mathematical structure, and that the job of physics is to discover that,” Smolin told me later. “The dream is in bad shape,” he added. “And it’s a dream that most of us are like recovering alcoholics from.” Lisi’s talk, he said, “was like being offered a drink.”

A simpler theory of everything was offered by Plato. See, in the Timaeus , the Platonic solids—

Figure from this journal on August 19th, 2008.
See also July 19th, 2008.

“It’s all in Plato, all in Plato:
bless me, what do  they
teach them at these schools!”
— C. S. Lewis