A surfer dude with no fixed address may be this century's Einstein.
A. Garrett Lisi, a physicist who divides his time between surfing in Maui and teaching snowboarding in Lake Tahoe, has come up with what may be the Grand Unified Theory.
That's the "holy grail" of physics that scientists have been searching for ever since
Albert Einstein presented his General Theory of Relativity nearly 100 years ago.
Even more remarkable is that Lisi, who has a Ph.D. but no permanent university affiliation, solves the problem without resorting to exotic dimensions, string theory or exceptionally complex mathematics.
A successful Grand Unified Theory would use a series of equations to show how the four fundamental forces of nature — gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces — relate to each other.
Electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, which controls radioactivity, were linked more than 30 years ago, and some progress has been made with linking them to the strong nuclear force, which binds protons together in the atomic nucleus.