The Mystery of Three Generations in E7
Physicist John Baez explores a beautiful mathematical pattern in the exceptional Lie algebra E7 that mirrors the three generations of quarks and leptons in the Standard Model. Building on work by Benjamin Nasmith, he shows how the Standard Model gauge group fits into E7, with a three-fold symmetry permuting the generations. Baez emphasizes this is a mathematical observation, not a physical theory, and discusses his use of Claude Opus 4.8 to help write the paper.
There is, in fact, a very interesting three-fold symmetry built into E7, which is revealed when we put the Standard Model Lie algebra into it.