More from TED, but considerably less grim:
Wired: Your entire career has been focused, in essence, on your rejection of string theory. What do you have against strings and extra dimensions?
Garrett Lisi: It’s more accurate to say my career (or, often, lack of one) has been focused on doing what I wanted. There are a lot of good things about string theory, and it’s great that some people want to work on it. But, to me, it seemed too disconnected from real particle physics and gravitation. It seemed unlikely that many of these string constructions could ever be experimentally tested, or connected up with the real world. So I set off to follow my own interests.