Eleven years ago Eugene Sittampalam was sitting in a hotel room on the Libyan coast when he stumbled, as if by fate, on the unified field theory of physics. "I was on an engineering project at the time, with hardly any social life," he says. "I would retire to my room after dinner. I would switch on the radio, relax at my table, and start doodling." The problem that occupied him has stumped physicists from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking: How to join together the profound yet disparate insights of general relativity and quantum theory. But Sittampalam's doodling, apparently, drew connections that the rest had missed. "One thing led to another," he says, "and before the evening was over, I had the inverse square law of gravity derived—for the first time ever—from first principles!"
Sittampalam has no advanced degrees in physics. His theory is girded by mathematics no more complicated ...
