Garrett Lisi loves to surf. “It’s simply the most fun one can have on this planet,” he says. So eight years ago, after leaving university, he followed his heart to the Hawaiian island of Maui, a surfer’s paradise. He is still known to drop everything for an impromptu trip to some distant shore in search of the perfect wave.

Last year Lisi made his home in Lake Tahoe, where California and Nevada meet in the Sierra Nevada mountains – just as beautiful as Maui, although there is no surf amid the peaks. Instead, he snowboards, “bending, not defying, gravity”.

Not that Lisi is some adrenaline addicted thrill seeker, living only for the next wave or slope to the exclusion of anything more meaningful. There is a higher purpose in his life: Lisi’s true obsession is exploring the nature of the universe at its most fundamental level.

With no affiliation to a university or research institute, for almost a decade he has worked tirelessly on a problem that has beaten even Albert Einstein. Two weeks ago the 39-year-old surfer physicist astonished the scientific world when he announced that he might have found an answer. Lisi describes it, with disarming frankness, as an “exceptionally simple theory of everything”.

Of course the theory isn’t at all simple. It is based around one of the most complicated symmetrical structures ever studied, a 248-dimensional shape known as E8 secrets of this geometric entity were revealed only in March, leaving mathematicians with 60 times as much information as was contained in the human genome. E8 has long intrigued academics since it was devised in the 19th century and it has been suspected that its symmetrical properties might be intimately linked to underlying patterns in creation in some way.

Lisi first encountered E8 six months ago and thought he saw mathematical echoes of his ideas about the cosmos in its structure; so he started “playing around” with it. When he used its shape to relate all the known fundamental particles and forces in the universe with each other, the pieces seemed to fit together like a jigsaw. He realised that this could be something profound.

If Lisi’s calculations are correct, the intimidating beauty of E8 could be the key to uniting all the fundamental forces and particles in the universe. For the first time, science would have an overarching explanation for why the cosmos is the way it is. “It would be kind of nice if it all made sense, mathematically anyway,” Lisi says. “It’s nice to think that there’s a bigger picture that’s beautiful and that we’re all a part of it.”

Could Lisi have cracked a problem that has defied some of the finest minds in history? While it has in no way embraced this lofty claim, the scientific community has given it a surprising amount of respect. Lee Smolin, founder of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, is full of praise: “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years.”

Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at Oxford, describes it as a long shot as a theory of everything, does seem to underpin much of nature’s fundamentalbut says that E8 structure.

Some have rejected the proposal out of hand: one physicist describes Lisi as a “crank” and his ideas as “baloney”. But most see the possibility, albeit far from proven, of genuine insight.

The hunt for a single theory that underpins everything has been the ultimate goal of physics for centuries. As they revealed the rules that dictated how the different facets of the natural world functioned, many of the first true scientists came to believe that the cosmos worked like clockwork. They insisted that science would ultimately reveal the entire mechanism and be able to account precisely for everything within it. While that certainty foundered with the discovery of quantum mechanics and relativity, the quest has gone on.

Einstein, the discoverer of relativity, dedicated much of his later life to discovering what became known as the Grand Unified Theory. But despite claiming four times to have made the crucial breakthrough, his efforts came to nothing.

The goal for many physicists has been to bring the twin pillars of modern physics – quantum mechanics and relativity – together in a single theory in which all four forces of the universe – gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces – can be shown to have one root. In recent years, advocates of an approach to fundamental physics dubbed string theory have taken up the challenge, devising ever more complex mathematical formulas, some requiring extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time, to try to beat the problem.

Lisi is unimpressed by string theory. For a man who is motivated by mathematical beauty, it is just too clumsy to be compelling and he quit university after completing his PhD rather than be forced to pursue it. Lisi excelled at school despite arguing constantly with his physics teacher and was an exceptional student at university. Now he had to try to figure out how the universe works on his own.

Lisi knows that speculating about “theories of everything” could be academic suicide. “The whole field is chock full with crackpots and wild and crazy ideas,” he says.

He may not have to wait long to see if his theory is right. In Douglas Adams’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it took the computer Deep Thought 7½m years to compute an answer to life, the universe and everything. Within 12 months of the Large Hadron Collider bursting into life in the Swiss countryside next year, the giant particle accelerator experiment should deliver its verdict, revealing whether or not the new fundamental particles that Lisi’s theory predicts should exist are actually there. The whole idea will stand of fall on this crucial test.

If Lisi is right, he will have been the first to stare knowingly at the geometry of creation. “E8 is both superficially and deeply beautiful and I will find it very satisfying if this is the geometric structure at the heart of our universe,” he says.

And if he’s wrong? “It is a long shot,” he admits. “This theory feels right but, if E8 not, I will toss it out and look somewhere else. It’s useless to argue with nature.

“Anyway, it’s unhealthy to be too attached to a particular theory. I try to make the rest of my life good enough that even if the physics I work on isn’t successful, I will have had a good life. All thinking and no action would make for a dull life. So I surf – a lot.”

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