The Creative Type

In 1905, a mysterious stranger appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and proposed to overturn conventional physics. He had no academic affiliation. Almost no one had heard of him. He was a lowly patent clerk. Yet he audaciously claimed that light was both particle and wave, that space and time were malleable, and that matter and energy were essentially the same.

After this mysterious fellow, Albert Einstein, had wreaked his havoc, hardly anyone thought such a thing could happen again in physics – the lone outsider riding into town, working wonders where conventional minds had failed, and living happily ever after in a bright haze of global adulation.

One reason was that the society of scientists that had grown up around Einstein’s theories had become, ironically, even less receptive to outsiders than it had been in Einstein’s day.

The physics elaborated by this society also had drifted into arcane realms, farther and farther from public apprehension. As the science writer John Horgan put it two years ago:

Many of physics’ best and brightest are obsessed with fulfilling a task that occupied Einstein’s latter years: finding a “unified theory” that fuses quantum physics and general relativity, which are as incompatible, conceptually and mathematically, as plaid and polka dots. But pursuers of this “theory of everything” have wandered into fantasy realms of higher dimensions with little or no empirical connection to our reality.

Despite Horgan’s point, I believe Einstein had more going for him than the fact that his theories were relatively accessible. He had an appealing personality. He gave the public what it wanted. He gave us the archetypes of genius, from the Plucky Outsider to the Kindly Old Sage. To probably 95 percent of the people who have ever revered Einstein, he has been little more than a celebrity – a genius because other people said so, and because he looked the part, not because he ever demonstrated it in a way a layman could understand. (Ditto for Richard Feynman and his bongo drums.)

All of which helps to explain, I think, the hoopla now surrounding A. Garrett Lisi, a surfer and snowboarder with no academic affiliation (and, it seems, no fixed address) who just might be making as big a splash as Einstein did – and by doing what Einstein failed to do, namely to unify general relativity and the standard model of particle physics, in a way that is conceptually not too arcane.

(more…)