catching up on Lisi

Speaking of real articles that sound like Onion articles, the best ever was probably this gem from the Telegraph in November 2007:

“Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything”

For those who may have missed it at the time, the “surfer dude” is UC-San Diego Ph.D. Garrett Lisi, who dropped out of academia to move to Hawaii, surf all day, and live in a van with his girlfriend. A very appealing offbeat character, obviously.

I hadn’t heard much more about his theory in the last 3+ years, so I went searching, and found THIS INTERESTING ARTICLE in Scientific American from November 2010, co-authored by Lisi and describing his theory. It makes testable predictions, and the Large Hadron Collider will pronounce the ultimate verdict on the theory. Lee Smolin has offered support, which isn’t surprising given that Lisi claims his job search was frustrated by the same string theory monopoly that Smolin complains about in his The Trouble with Physics, which is quite a nice read for anyone who’s interested.