Solution to "The Theory of Everything"?

Saw an interesting post on Dvorak Uncensored on Thursday entitiled "Has A Surfer Dude Solved ‘The Theory of Everything’?" I'm always a sucker for stories about surfer dudes having spent a lot of time in San Diego while growing up, so I read the post. After the post, I clicked on the link to a more detailed story Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything. It had links to the guy's (A. Garrett Lisi) work and life. Interesting reading!

It never ceases to amuse me how the media plays up the surfing aspect of someone that is successful. They did the same thing when J. Craig Venter was at the leading the charge in decoding the human genome a few years ago. Then again, there was the fairly recent story about the aging rock star (Brian May of Queen) going back to finish his PhD in Astrophysics. Some sort of leveling, or is it that surprising that nerds do something other than read books and work on computers?

Update November 18, 2007: A friend of mine from graduate school (M has a PhD in Physics and follows the Physics world quite closely) pointed me to a post by Dr. Sean Carrol "Garrett Lisi's Theory of Everything" about the paper. Garrett has posted a few comments in response. He continues to seem very humble about his work.

Update November 20, 2007: Decided to poke around and see if there was any further activity regarding Garrett's paper. There was! The BackReaction blog posted A Theoretically Simple Exception of Everything. The comments are interesting, as Dr. Lisi responded to several commenters. After reading the post and comments, I clicked on Garrett's name in one of his responses. It took me to Deferential Geometry his wiki. The wiki is interesting---at times you could see it rendering what looked like TeX for the links.... A little poking revealed that he is using TiddlyWiki, created by Jeremy Ruston, and jsMath, made by Davide P. Cervone. They work well together!