THE SHITSTORM BLEW IN the moment the paper hit the Web. First, the managers of arxiv.org recategorized Lisi's paper from the respectable "high energy" section to the "general" area, a graveyard for laymen and quacks. They subsequently moved it back, but the shuffling foreshadowed difficulties to come. On November 15, an article appeared in New Scientist, a respected British science magazine, describing the paper and mentioning Lisi's unusual background. Within days, the story spiraled across the globe, from the Daily News & Analysis in Bombay to Fox News here.

The media explosion drew the attention of physics blogs devoted to disputes over the latest research. For many theoretical physicists, a lifetime's work on a theory—combined with a high danger of ending up wrong—necessitates serious emotional investment. So the decibel level of criticism, especially online, tends to start at 11.

Most of the broadsides simply echoed problems Lisi himself had admitted in the paper, like the incorporation of only first-generation particles. But some people simply waved it off. The truth is, most theoretical physicists can't be bothered to sort out Lisi's theory until he solves its problems.

"Lisi's paper seems to me to be pretty much nonsense," responded Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist from Boston University, when I e-mailed him about Lisi. "I have no interest in discussing it or in enhancing the idiotic hoopla about it."

More sanguine researchers, however, argue that Lisi's approach is both intriguing and elegant, and that it lacks any glaring, fatal flaws. "No one has come up with a theory that works yet. It's the same for all of us," says John Donoghue, a theoretical physicist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "It's premature to canonize him but premature to say he's barking up the wrong tree."

Smolin has already posted a paper online building on Lisi's, offering a simpler way to formulate some of Lisi's math. "I don't see it as a finished theory," he says of Lisi's formulation. "I see it as some mathematical observations and then a proposal."

What's required to make it work, according to Lisi, is a combination of mathematical grunt work and a new insight or two. "The main problem is finding how the second and third generations work. If you try any of the obvious ways to make them fit, it doesn't work. So it has to be nonobvious." If he can solve that, E₈ would allow him to predict the properties of some of the 20 unknown particles. The ultimate proof, or disproof, could then come when the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, begins operating later this year in Switzerland. It is widely anticipated that the LHC will lead to the discovery of new subatomic particles, and string theorists are also betting on it to validate some of their ideas.

"Right now there is no experimental reason to have confidence in this theory—for the same reason that there is no experimental reason to have confidence in string theory," Lisi says. "Either the numbers that come out of the geometry are going to match up with these physical constants, or they are not. If they don't, then the theory is wrong. That's all there is to it."