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Eric Ross Weinstein (born October 26, 1965) is an American
podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing ...
host and a managing director of
Thiel Capital Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Fac ...
.


Education

Weinstein received his PhD in
mathematical physics Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematics, mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The ''Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and t ...
from
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
in 1992 under the supervision of
Raoul Bott Raoul Bott (September 24, 1923 – December 20, 2005) was a Hungarian-American mathematician known for numerous basic contributions to geometry in its broad sense. He is best known for his Bott periodicity theorem, the Morse–Bott functions whi ...
. In his dissertation, ''Extension of Self-Dual Yang-Mills Equations Across the Eighth Dimension'', Weinstein showed that the
self-dual Yang–Mills equations In mathematics, a duality translates concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one fashion, often (but not always) by means of an involution operation: if the dual of is , then the ...
were not peculiar to dimension four and admitted generalizations to higher dimensions.


Career


Physics

Weinstein left academia after stints at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
and the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; he, הַאוּנִיבֶרְסִיטָה הַעִבְרִית בִּירוּשָׁלַיִם) is a public research university based in Jerusalem, Israel. Co-founded by Albert Einstein and Dr. Chaim Weiz ...
. Weinstein was invited to a colloquium by mathematician
Marcus du Sautoy Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy (; born 26 August 1965) is a British mathematician, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Fellow of New College, Oxford and author of popular mathematics and popu ...
at Oxford University's
Clarendon Laboratory The Clarendon Laboratory, located on Parks Road within the Science Area in Oxford, England (not to be confused with the Clarendon Building, also in Oxford), is part of the Department of Physics at Oxford University. It houses the atomic and ...
in May 2013. There he presented his ideas on a theory of everything called ''Geometric Unity''. Physicists expressed skepticism about the theory. 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 The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundred ...
. Science writer
Jennifer Ouellette Jennifer Ouellette (born May 17, 1964) is a science writer based in Los Angeles, California. Life and career Ouellette is the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange, an initiative of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) de ...
criticized the colloquium in a blog for ''
Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it i ...
'', arguing that experts could not properly evaluate Weinstein's ideas because there was no published paper. On April 1, 2021, Weinstein released a draft paper on ''Geometric Unity'' in a guest appearance on the podcast ''
The Joe Rogan Experience ''The Joe Rogan Experience'' is a podcast hosted by American comedian, presenter, and UFC color commentator Joe Rogan. It launched on December 24, 2009, on YouTube by Rogan and comedian Brian Redban, who was its sole co-host and producer until ...
''. Weinstein qualified in his paper that he "is not a physicist," but an "entertainer" and podcast host. It received strong criticism from the scientific community and was said to have "no visible impact" and "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."


Economics

On November 10, 2021, Weinstein presented at the University of Chicago a proposal for how
gauge theory In physics, a gauge theory is a type of field theory in which the Lagrangian (and hence the dynamics of the system itself) does not change (is invariant) under local transformations according to certain smooth families of operations (Lie groups) ...
could be used to calculate economic inflation indices based on prior work with his wife Pia Malaney. A month later, a rebuttal was published by Timothy Nguyen (a frequent Weinstein critic) on the
arXiv arXiv (pronounced "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of ...
.


Intellectual dark web

Weinstein said he coined the term "
intellectual dark web The intellectual dark web (IDW) is a label which has been applied to some commentators who oppose what they regard as the dominance of identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture in higher education and the news media within W ...
" and named himself and his brother as members after his brother
Bret Weinstein Bret Samuel Weinstein (; born February 21, 1969) is an American podcaster, author, and former professor of evolutionary biology. He served on the faculty of Evergreen State College from 2002 until 2017, when he resigned in the aftermath of a s ...
resigned from
Evergreen State College The Evergreen State College is a public liberal arts college in Olympia, Washington. Founded in 1967, it offers a non-traditional undergraduate curriculum in which students have the option to design their own study towards a degree or follow a p ...
, in response to a 2017 campus controversy. The term is used to describe a number of academics and podcast hosts.


References


Notes


External links

* https://ericweinstein.org/ {{DEFAULTSORT:Weinstein, Eric 1965 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 20th-century American Jews American podcasters American venture capitalists Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni University of Pennsylvania alumni 21st-century American Jews