Antony Garrett Lisi

Antony Garrett Lisi (born January 24, 1968) is an American theoretical physicist, known for his highly publicized Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything (generally ignored or rejected by experts).

Antony Garrett Lisi

Quotes

• Is our universe fundamentally a mess, or is there some simple and natural structure that all this could emerge from, or be parts of? One approach to answering these questions is String Theory (or, more generally, M-Theory), but string unification models have grown excessively in complexity while producing zero predictive progress. After several decades of extensive theoretical exploration leading nowhere, it is time to consider that the string program may have been a wrong turn. If we backtrack, imagining String Theory never happened, we can go in a new direction, building on the success of Grand Unified Theories and recent progress in Loop Quantum Gravity. The structures of GUTs and LQG rely heavily on Lie groups and are remarkably compatible. By considering the known Lie groups and fields of physics as parts of a larger geometric whole, we move towards Lie group unification.
  • (2015). "Lie group cosmology". arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.08073.

• I think that, without experimental checks, physics can — and has — gone off the rails ... experiment has to be the ultimate decider of what is good physics.
  • (January 21, 2021)"Garrett Lisi: An EXCEPTIONAL Theory of Everything LIVE CHAT". YouTube, Dr Brian Keating. (quote at 20:28 of 54:54)

Quotes about Lisi

• For almost a decade, Lisi moved on no fixed schedule between Maui, where he likes to surf, and the mountains of the West, where he snowboards. Four years ago, Lisi persuaded his girlfriend, Crystal Baranyk, who is an artist, to move with him into an old Colorado ski-shuttle van; he remodelled it himself, shipped it to Maui, and parked it by the beach. They lived in the van for a year, with no toilet. He worked intermittently, sometimes as a snowboard instructor, once on a short-term consulting contract when a friend’s software company needed an algorithm solved, but mostly he tried to think about physics.
  • By Benjamin Wallace-Wells: (July 2008)"Surfing the Universe: An academic dropout and the search for a Theory of Everything". The New Yorker.

• Back then, he admits, his theory still had some shortcomings; for example the three generations of fermions didn't quite come out right. But this was in 2007. In the years since, Garrett has solved some of the remaining puzzles. Still, his masterpiece is unfinished, not yet to his full satisfaction.
  • Sabine Hossenfelder: in "Chapter 7. One to Rule Them All". Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. 2018.