#2 Wikipedia:
Eric Ross Weinstein (born October 26, 1965)[2] is an American cultural commentator. He is the managing director of Thiel Capital.[1][3]
Weinstein received his PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard University in 1992 under the supervision of Raoul Bott.[4][5][6] In his dissertation, Extension of Self-Dual Yang-Mills Equations Across the Eighth Dimension, Weinstein showed that the self-dual Yang–Mills equations were not really peculiar to dimension four and admitted generalizations to higher dimensions.[7]
Weinstein left academia after stints at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. More than 20 years later, in 2013, he announced a potential unified theory of physics. At the invitation of mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, Weinstein described the theory at a colloquium, Geometric Unity, in May 2013 at the University of Oxford's Clarendon Laboratory.[8] Physicists expressed skepticism about the theory.[8][9] Joseph Conlon of Oxford stated that some of the predicted particles would already have been detected in existing accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider.[8] Science writer Jennifer Ouellette criticized the colloquium in a blog for Scientific American, arguing that experts could not properly evaluate Weinstein's ideas because there was no published paper.[10]
Eight years passed until Weinstein released a draft paper of Geometric Unity on April 1, 2021. The paper qualifies that the author "is not a physicist" but an "entertainer", and it has received strong criticism from the scientific community, including having "no visible impact" and having "gaps both mathematical and physical in origin that jeopardize Geometric Unity as a well-defined theory, much less one that is a candidate for a theory of everything."[11]
Incidentally, his younger brother is the Progressive evolutionary biologist who was driven out of Evergreen State College in 2017 for objecting to white students and faculty being requested to participate in off-campus anti-racism training during the annual Day of Absence protest, instead of continuing the tradition of carrying on as usual while minority members took the day off to highlight their contributions. |