Get an attic to find the TOE

Peter Shor offers this advice to those searching for a TOE:

So the only advice I have is that more physicists need to not worry about grants, and go hide in their attics and work on new and crazy theories, the way Andrew Wiles worked on Fermat's Last Theorem. 

But there is a little issue: most researchers have no Attics any more - by which I mean a topic dear to their heart on which they will work in special time. So far, I have only met a handful of researchers that had one.

Interestingly, the majority of them were women. There is hope. I think women will reach there first.