In Stephen Hawking's 1998 opinion, "there’s a 50-50 chance that someone will discover the Holy Grail of physics within the next 20 years."
Now hear this:
"Now this naked guy here, just another person wandering around the playa . . . It was a solid game, no obvious blunders, I was simply outplayed. I am quite certain that there is no other place where I could go and be beaten at a game of chess by a nudist playing on a sixteen-foot square board with alien pieces. And bizarre stuff like this was happening all the time."
The preceding is from the Web site of Garrett Lisi, the physics whiz-cum-surfer-cum-world unifier who may have fashioned the “Holy Grail” of physics while crunching numbers in the morning and hanging ten in the afternoon.
But whether Lisi has put theoretical physicists on par with philosophy majors for jobs at McDonald's (as a classmate of mine jokingly put it), the man behind the magic deserves some examination.
While the Telegraph piece above paints him as a sort of idiot savant (“Being poor sucks,” he is quoted as saying), the other interviews that I’ve read draw him out a little further. And while I don’t know his religious leanings, its his type of rethinking and redrawing the Right Way To Do Things that serves as the highest model of what I think a free thinker or humanist could aspire to.
1. “I think what one needs in life is balance. I like to spend a few hours a day working on physics in silence, and a few hours playing outside or goofing off.” Lisi thinks work is best carried out in a sort of Science Hostel, where investigators could work together or alone in a quiet, socially supportive atmosphere with “as little responsibility as possible.”
As a student at Virginia Tech, I know more than a few engineers/physicists/science-types, and between the classroom, the lab and their mountains of homework, “balance” isn’t the first word that comes to my mind. If you want to call yourself a free thinker, then you’ve got to not only call your place within the Standard Way Things Work into question, but the Standard Way Things Work. It’s easy to say the system sucks. It’s not easy to build a new mousetrap. The question Lisi poses to me is, “How creative can you be?”
2. “We have these big brains, and a limited amount of time. So what to do? A lot of people spend their time making money, sometimes with the hope that they'll be able to do what they want after they make it. But you never get that time back. Theoretical physics is the most abstractly beautiful and challenging pursuit there is. It's what I want to spend my time thinking about, so that's what I do.”
Where the thinker has to be creative, he or she must also have courage. For someone to graduate from a highly-respected Physics department with a 3.9 and to head off for Maui to surf and continue his research would be like Bill Belichick deciding he was going to design the perfect offense in Nigeria because he believed Nigeria the only place it was going to happen, if it was going to happen, all else be damned. When you’ve got a conviction and a lifestyle that suit you, do you have the courage to follow it through?
In one interview, Lisi puts his big idea pretty simply:
Q: I dream of…... discovering a beautiful T.o.E. [theory of everything] that kicks string theory's ass.
Good luck, bro.
Comments (2)
predictably profound, David!
Posted November 21, 2007 3:15 PM
Posted on November 21, 2007 15:15
Surf on man.
Posted November 17, 2007 10:41 PM
Posted on November 17, 2007 22:41