A New Way To Explain Everything

Surfer-Physicist Offers A New Way To Explain Everything

Garrett Lisi is widely recognized as a thoughtful physicist. But unlike most, he has no longstanding university or research affiliation. He surfs. Snowboards in the winter. Scrapes together cash, and in between, has published a paper that outlines a new universal theory of everything.

Lisi's paper, published in pre-print form here, has won him instant buzz in the physics world, as well as popular attention unusual for such a mathematically abstract topic. He's convinced he has found what amounts to the field's Holy Grail: a way to explain all physical forces, including gravity, as different manifestations of the same underlying principle.

Physicists since Einstein have tackled this problem with substantial success -- but only up to a point. The ever-more-complicated string theory is one deeply abstract way of approaching the problem, which requires a universe with 11 dimensions to make mathematical sense.

Lisi's idea is based on an extraordinarily complicated geometric shape called E8, an eight-dimensional shape with 248 points – a pattern he thinks may describe the underlying geometry of the universe itself. The myriad of different particles and forces we perceive would then stem from this shape's weirdly symmetric geometry.

One of the most intriguing things about the theory is that it might be tested more easily than string theory in the powerful Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator that will start operating in Switzerland next year. It makes predictions of particles that no one has ever seen, but which might show up in the LHC's detectors, Lisi argues.

So stay tuned – if the surfer's theory turn out to be even partially descriptive of the world, a story to rival Einstein's will enter physics history.