BY 2006 LISI WAS "damn near broke" and still lacked a cohesive theory. Then he heard that the Foundational Questions Institute, a U.S. group that funds theoretical research, was offering grants for research into "new frontiers" of physics. He threw together an application in a last-ditch effort to make good on seven years of solitary scribbling. A rejection, he mused on his Web site, "will probably really mean my work just isn't that good."

Instead, the institute selected Lisi's proposal, along with those of 29 other applicants from places like Harvard and MIT. Lisi was the only researcher not housed at a major university or institute.

"We never want to forget that Albert Einstein wasn't working in academia when he discovered the theory of relativity," says Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist and the institute's director. "It's important to gamble, because sometimes long shots can turn out to be home runs." Lisi got $77,000 for two years. Upon receiving his first research check in a decade, he bought the most valuable research tool he could think of: a new mountain bike.

He and Baranyk stashed their van in Maui and drifted to Tahoe, where friends loaned them a house above the lake. It was there, early last year, that Lisi stumbled onto his second significant insight. Up one morning reading mathematics blogs, he came across a posting by John Baez about an elaborate structure called E₈ that, when projected in two dimensions, looks like the world's most elegant Spirograph. E₈ is one of a number of complex symmetrical shapes discovered in the late 1800s. With 240 separate vertices, it is so complicated that it recently took a team of 18 academics four years to sort through its mathematical possibilities.

When Lisi saw Baez's posting, he realized instantly that E₈ matched the rough model he'd been building since Breckenridge. "It was the most stunning thing I could ever ask for," he says. "I walked around with my brain tickling, thinking, This is going to work."

He began doing the calculations to map some of the 226 known subatomic particles and forces, together with gravity, explicitly onto E₈. The math seemed to hold, at least for what are known as "first-generation" particles. (Most subatomic particles have three variations, called generations. First-generation particles make up everyday matter, while the others show up only at extraordinarily high energies.) When Lisi rotated the shape or added together its points, the mathematical results matched the properties already discovered at particle accelerators, where physicists bash matter together to test theories about forces and sub-particles. On the E₈ model, there were 20 points left over, perhaps representing particles yet to be discovered. An E₈ model of the universe, Lisi concluded, had the potential to be proved or disproved by the discovery of these unknown particles.

After communicating with several physicists, he went to an academic conference last June in Morelia, Mexico, and met Smolin. This was followed by a presentation at the Perimeter Institute, which is dedicated to nonestablishment physics research. "The talk was very clear, and he emphasized the open issues and the high-risk nature of things," says Smolin. "He knew he was putting forward something that, if correct, is highly interesting, but he did it cautiously and modestly." Buoyed by the reception, Lisi was stoked enough to post the paper online.