Alumni Spotlight - Dr. Garrett Lisi '86

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT – DR. GARRETT LISI '86

Born in Los Angeles and raised in San Diego, California, Garrett Lisi graduated Cate School in 1986. He learned to surf in San Diego, where he traveled between surf breaks in an old VW Bus. Lisi went on to receive two B.S. degrees with highest honors in physics and mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1991. He made several trips to Hawaii and, while enrolled as a graduate student in San Diego, traveled to Tahiti where he spent three weeks surfing Teahupoo, considered to have some of the most challenging waves in the world. Lisi received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, San Diego in 1999.

After getting his Ph.D., Lisi left academia and moved to Maui. On Maui, Lisi volunteered as a staff member at a local Sudbury school, and split his time between working on his own physics research and surfing. Eventually, he submitted a grant application to the newly formed Foundational Questions Institute, and was awarded an FQXi grant to develop his research in quantum mechanics and unification in 2006. The grant allowed Lisi to devote his full attention to physics and create his personal research wiki, Deferential Geometry. On June 9, 2007, Lisi realized that the algebraic structure he had constructed (over ten years of research) to unify the standard model of particle physics with general relativity perfectly matched the algebraic structure of the E8 Lie group. Lisi said "The moment this happened my brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing." Discussions of Lisi's theory developed rapidly over most major physics blogs, and the story of Lisi's theory and personal history was reported by many online and traditional media sources around the world. Lisi said "After the story broke, I awoke to Pandora's Inbox."

When not doing research, Garrett Lisi is an adventure sports enthusiast — surfing, snowboarding, and kitesurfing at the expert level as well as participating in many other adventure sports.

Did you always know your career would be in scientific research?

I've always been a geek. When I was a little boy and the other kids wanted to be firemen or doctors, I wanted to be an aerospace engineer. I honed my aerospace skills testing paper airplane designs in front of Parsonage. But I was drawn more and more towards mathematics, and when I saw how it describes the universe via physics... it was like discovering the true magic underlying our physical world. I like figuring things out, and the secret of how the universe works is the greatest, most satisfying puzzle I can find to work on.

What is your favorite part about your job?

What I like about my job is that it's no job at all. I've spent my whole life creatively unemployed, avoiding anything resembling a real job. If you fully pursue what you love, and get good at it, people will pay you to do it. Then you get to decide how much you work for money. I've been able to arrange my life so that almost all my time is free, and I fill it with what I want to be doing; somehow I still manage to eat.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

I don't set definite goals; although I am motivated by my daydreams, and set events in motion to try and realize them. But you have to figure that whoever you are in the future is going to be wiser and have more information and be better able to make decisions than you are now. I try to set things up which will lead to a fun and interesting future -- but life is chaos, and there's no way to predetermine how things will go.

When you're not deep in research or enjoying the outdoors, how do you spend your time?

If I'm not working or playing outside I'm probably talking, reading, eating, or hanging out with friends -- online or off. When I was at Cate I was one of few people spending most of their time attached to a computer. These days it seems like everyone is wired in. I guess the nerds won. With friends all over the world, I get to think locally and act globally.

What is your favorite memory of Cate?

I'm standing on the senior lawn, the sun beginning to set behind Long House, the clouds turning into wispy orange streaks. I've just thrown a frisbee on a rising trajectory and it's hovering over the heads of my friends, who are looking up as it descends, getting ready to jump for it. One of them is going to catch it.

I think my years at Cate shaped who I am in ways I'm not fully conscious of, but I'm happy about what I learned and who I became.