Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate, but doesn't teach because he spends most of his time in Hawaii surfing and in the winter snowboarding near Lake Tahoe. He is also a physicist who has spent some time working out the complexities of the intricate, elegant shape pictured above. It's called an E8, a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points.
Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything
Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
Unlike the Standard Model of everything that can weave together only three of the four fundamental forces of nature, Lisi's E8 theory can accommodate all four. I know very little about physics, but the shape is very beautiful and looks like a mandala. In Oriental Art, a mandala represent the cosmos.
Lisi believes that our universe is this beautiful shape.
"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."
I believe what John Keats wrote long ago, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." So I'm placing my bet on E8 instead of a spaghetti universe of superstrings.