Just a month ago The New Yorker published an article on the physicist Garrett Lisi.

Antony Garrett Lisi is an American-born theoretical physicist and adventure sports enthusiast. Lisi is best known for his work, “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” which proposes a unified field theory combining a grand unification theory of particle physics with Albert Einstein’s general relativistic description of gravitation using the largest simple exceptional Lie algebra, E₈.

Lisi has a Ph.D. in physics, but has worked as an independent researcher rather than holding an academic position. He is a strong proponent of balance in life, particularly between scientific research and the enjoyment of the outdoors. wikipedia.org

[youtube.com=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-xHw9zcCvRQ]

What I love about what I’m reading about Lisi is that “in June, 2007, a thirty-nine-year-old unemployed physicist named Garrett Lisi arrived at a professional conference in Morelia, mexico, to give a twenty-minute talk…Lisi believed that he had discovered what physicists call a Theory of Everything – a unifying idea that aims to incorporate all the universe’s forces in a single mathematical framework…the style of a well-trained Ph.D. going away, thinking hard about something for a long time, and coming back with something very original, something that’s a well-worked-out and well-thought-through point of view, is an essential, if rare, part of how theoretical physics progresses…Garrett fit the pattern… but Lisi, when he arrived in Morelia, was so obscure that he could not think of a single reputable physicist who might recommend him for a job…Lisi got his Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego, completing his dissertation on the mathematics of the movement of water over a swimming dolphin’s skin, and then, at thirty-one, dropped out of academia and nearly out of society. For almost a decade, Lisi moved on no fixed schedule between Maui, where he likes to surf, and the mountains of the West where he snowboards… He worked intermittently, sometimes as a snowboard instructor, once on a short-term consulting contract when a friend’s software company needed an algorithm solved, but mostly he tried to think about physics…he willfully cut loose from the world of academic physics, built his theory as an outsider might, relying on a grab bag of component parts: a hand-built mathematical structure, an unconventional way of describing gravity, and a mysterious mathematical entity known as E8.”