Surfing the Universe.(Garrett Lisi, 'An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything',)

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. The conference was attended by all the top researchers in a field called loop quantum gravity, which had emerged as a leading challenger to string theory. Morelia is in a region susceptible to earthquakes, and it occurred to Lisi that if there was an earthquake string theory might predominate for the next twenty years. This thought was not pleasing to him.

Lisi had not been to a professional conference in eight years, and he was anxious about speaking in public. He has since learned that he can conquer this fear if he writes out all his remarks and reads from the script. But he hadn't yet learned that tactic, and so he overcame his nerves by submerging his ideas in a mass of equations.

In the audience was a physicist named Lee Smolin, one of the three founders of the field of loop quantum gravity and a prominent member of the faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Ontario. Smolin had a bad cold that day, and so, through the double fog of his illness and of Lisi's exceedingly technical language, he grasped only the contours of what he was listening to. 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 Theory of Everything has been the holy grail of theoretical physics for a century; Nobels are won for partial contributions to it. Here was somebody, with no reputation, saying that he might have figured out the key to the whole thing. Within four months, however, and after a second talk, Smolin was telling Lisi that he had "one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in years."

"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."

There is a persistent legend in physics of the hermit genius, the scientist who drops out of academia and then returns, many years later, with an insight that moves the discipline forward. The brilliant outsider has become almost a stock character. David Deutsch, a British pioneer of quantum computer theory, had dropped out of paid academia several years before his theories won wide acclaim. Julian Barbour, whose theories helped pioneer a key physics concept known as background independence, left the university and never returned, holding forth in a farmhouse twenty miles outside Oxford and receiving graduate students as pilgrims. The most famous outsider genius was the patent clerk Albert Einstein. "Look, in my experience, 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," Smolin said. "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. Einstein at least had a weekly discussion club in Bern, where he muddled through Poincare and Hume. Lisi had 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. Four years ago, Lisi persuaded his girlfriend, Crystal Baranyk, who is an artist, to move with him into an old Colorado ski-shuttle van; he remodelled it himself, shipped it to Maui, and parked it by the beach. They lived in the van for a year, with no toilet. 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. When Lisi arrived in Morelia, it was as if the Sierra Nevada and the physical sciences had joined to produce their own version of Sidd Finch.