Is it all about geometry?

Garrett Lisi likes to surf and snowboard, which is what he does when not giving lectures at places like the International Loop Quantum Gravity Seminar on the Theory of Everything.

Lisi, who has a PhD in Physics from the University of California, San Diego, has been getting a lot of press for his proposal that uses E8, a 248-dimension Lie Group, originally researched by Norwegian mathematician Marius Sophus Lie in 1887, to explain all the known forces of the universe in a GUT or grand unification theory.

Some think the results of Lisi's work may be equivalent to that of string theory. Others just want to string him up: one string theorist called Lisi a crackpot. But Lisi can take comfort in riding this wave: at least to date no one has called him a lousy surfer.