> In these interviews, Weinstein laments that the scientific community is dismissive of GU because he has not released a technical paper, but insists that scientists should be able to understand the substantive content of GU from the lecture alone
This is alarm bells territory. There's nothing there.
> 20 points for emailing me and complaining about the crackpot index. (E.g., saying that it "suppresses original thinkers" or saying that I misspelled "Einstein" in item 8.)
In a technical field such as physics or mathematics, "the technical details" are at minimum of paramount importance, and perhaps even constitute everything of importance. You can't cry victimhood over your colleagues not filling in the gaps and taking care of the "technical" problems for you (presumably with the credit flowing to you anyway). Now that he is very wealthy, I don't see why he couldn't hire a few young physicists to do this work for him, if he had enough confidence in his idea, btw.
Horrible attitude which puts him in crank territory, imho.
>nor does one's attitude have any bearing on ones' truth claims. Newton was famously an asshat
I never said that it would. I have nothing bad to say about Newton, either--- either personally or otherwise. I'm not sure about the exact meaning of the term, "asshat", and I don't care to research it, though.
"Horrible attitude which puts him in crank territory, imho."
You literally attributed his 'horrible attitude' to putting him in 'crank territory' i.e. 'Common synonyms for crank include crackpot and kook.'
I'm in no position to comment on the nature of his work, but there's an unhealthy amount of ad-hominem here. Maybe it's fair to speculate a bit but I don't think we can just say 'bad attitude -> crap science' etc..
To clarify, regarding crankhood: it is the lack of details presented in the "theory", combined with his inaccurate view of how science is conducted ("others not doing all the work for me" == "it's being suppressed due a conspiracy"), not his attitude per sei (although that does comprehend the aforementioned facts in some sense), which does the trick.
Being a quant does not mean being very wealthy. On his podcast he has said himself he is in no way rich. He has a day job, one which probably pays well. Calling him very wealthy can not be correct.
> You can't cry victimhood over your colleagues not filling in the gaps and taking care of the "technical" problems for you (presumably with the credit flowing to you anyway).
Papers commonly have multiple authors. Why would it be an issue to have multiple people work on different aspects of it? Being shunned from your department for personal reasons without consideration on the merit of the theory is an entirely different matter.
Like it or not, ideally, there ought to be a slight bias in favor of the status quo in terms of revolutionary knowledge claims. That friction counteracts the unknown, unexamined, potential deficiencies of the new theory. Furthermore, a "put-up or shut up" standard is also appropriate.
There are much, much better reasons to be skeptical and critical of authorities and institutions. I feel connecting his theory to this general attitude serves to marginally discredit the latter in net. Which is why a group like Vice would pounce on a story like this.
> Like it or not, ideally, there ought to be a slight bias in favor of the status quo in terms of revolutionary knowledge claims.
Slight bias should not entail preventing you defending your PhD thesis or throwing you out of the department.
> I feel connecting his theory to this general attitude serves to marginally discredit the latter in net. Which is why a group like Vice would pounce on a story like this.
I wonder how you would react if your life's work resulted you in being outcast from your community and not even given a chance to defend yourself. It is so easy to have no compassion from people you do not know personally. Maybe you should look in the mirror to find some more instances of horrible attitude.
Eric Weinstein is very wealthy, has many supporters, is invited to many talkshows, and holds an important position in industry that enables him to have many connections. If he can't find professional support, then that is a smell.
Compare to Mochizuki, who is in fact a career mathematician, but is also having trouble finding support.
Actually, your link to 'evidence' I don't think really supports your case.
I see a guy empathetically admitting his technical faults, and who also seems to be bullied out of academia.
Einstein was notoriously technically weak and this is not entirely uncommon in many fields.
I disagree with your assessment that he believes the 'details are irrelevant' (admittedly, I listened for a few minutes at your link and he didn't say that), rather it would seem logically that at least as a 'first step' the details are not - intuition usually comes before the details.
Unless you have actual evidence that he really believes his ideas should be accepted purely on the basis of their conceptual novelty irrespective of their technical merit, I don't think it's fair to put words in his mouth. (Maybe your link was to the wrong spot?).
I don't know what to make of it - it seems on one hand like a giant 'attention scheme' PR campaign, on another like a man down his own rabbit hole, but I sense on some level there's some good faith however lacking in self-awareness there may be on his own behalf.
None of the commenters here as of the time I've written this seem to be willing to take it on at face value, granted, very few people could, but still, we seem to be posting ad-hominem instead of references to serious discussions of the work.
If it's quackery then hopefully it should be obviously outed as that. If there's 'something' there, even some legit neat ideas, that should be recognized as well.
Edit: I should add, I'm entirely sympathetic to anyone willing to take a serious stab at hard problems. There's no way this guy is actually devious, at worst he lacks self awareness, but there's at least Art in that. As long as people are not taking up research money with 'quackery' then it's great that people are storming the gates of the unknown.
I have no idea if Eric Weinstein is a misunderstood genius or not. Hopefully history will redeem him if he is. This caveat at the top of his research paper is not indicative of trustworthy, serious science though:
I give it well under 1% odds that he's right, but boy would I like to see him have a conversation about it with a critic that understands what he's talking about.
I don't think you can consider Sabine a critic that understands what [s]he's talking about. She is a popularizer of science but hasn't produced anything to suggest she's near the top of her field. And she has some really fringe ideas, like the support of super-determinism.
I do think her guest poster Timothy Nguyen came across as knowing what he's talking about.
I'm not Hossenfelder's biggest fan, but she is more than qualified. She's best known for her popularizations -- as is the case for practically every living physicist you've ever heard of -- but her work on quantum gravity is real. She's as qualified as pretty much anybody else who's going to appear in public to talk about such things.
She's better known for her criticism of the process of physics, a thing which is both correct and somewhat irritating (because it's not really a secret and she's not offering useful solutions). But she is a genuine physicist as well as a popularizer.
I didn't say she's a fake physicist, just that I don't think she's a very good one.
> She's as qualified as pretty much anybody else who's going to appear in public to talk about such things.
Not at all. There are thousands of people who clearly have a much deeper understanding of fundamental physics and some of them are popularizers too. Lenny Susskind is a good example. Peter Shor, who sometimes comments on her blog. There are plenty of bloggers who aren't famous.
I suspect when somebody's coming out of nowhere offering to solve the whole shebang of physics, any advanced physicist is likely to be as good as any other. Weinstein is not, as I understand it, building off of the most cutting-edge work, but offering a new approach. Having deeper understanding of the state of the art may not be a benefit.
It is almost certainly rubbish, and anybody could probably tell him that. It's probably not worth the time of anybody anywhere near the cutting edge, just a blogger who wants the attention.
On the off chance it's actually correct, the person to affirm that it's correct is almost certainly not a popularizer at all. It'll be some obscure academics who see the merit and fill in the details -- which will be read by the popularizers and translated. But if I were one of them I wouldn't start sharpening my pencils yet.
> any advanced physicist is likely to be as good as any other
It certainly matters how well they understand the material for being able critique a new approach. And there is a big difference in understanding throughout the field – people are not interchangeable.
Sabine hasn't said anything that would indicate she knows why Erik's theory won't work, unlike the post by Nguyen.
“I don’t trust these people,” Weinstein said, referring to physicists at universities. “It’s an entire system that believes in peer review, it believes in forced citations, you have to be at a university, you have to get an endorsement to use a preprint server. It’s too few resources, too many sharp elbows.”
It gives me the Crown Sterling sponsored talk at Black Hat feelz.
> The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an Entertainer
and host of The Portal podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress
which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from
without express permission of the author.
Copyright typically only applies to expressions of an idea, not the idea itself. You cannot copyright the observation that the sky is blue, but you can copyright a poem describing this circumstance in a certain language.
In this particular instance, a scientific theory is not copyrightable, but a paper describing said theory definitely is. Sci-Hub is in hot water precisely because copyright on papers is a thing.
If you wanted to exercise ownership rights on a theory itself, your best bet would be patent law. Patents apply to ideas, but only within the realm of making actual objects. Abstract ideas like scientific theories are usually not patentable, except for the realm of software. Software patents typically cover algorithms and thus mathematical concepts, and since software is a way for mathematical principles to enter commerce, it's probably your only way. (This is also why software patents are so controversial: It's the closest thing to "denying others access to an idea" that we have in our current system of law.)
Thinking if it's not a TOE it's a failure is shortsighted. Maybe it's a dead end. Maybe there's some insight that a future physicist will use as part of a better theory. Maybe the shortcomings can be addressed. We'll see.
This is just the sort of thing that we say, "That's not right. It's not even wrong!" about. He is wasting our time. Garrett Lisi might be wrong, which would put him well ahead of Weinstein.
"Download the GU Draft - Add your email address to our waitlist to get the latest version of Eric's Geometric Unity manuscript."
At very minimum, this is a giant PR move.
When was the last time you saw someone use the release of a paper to build up their email marketing list?
Because of this man's side-story problems which may lead many to be cynical and laden his work with a kind of political or emotional criticism, it would be interesting just to hear the dispassionate on it, i.e. does it have any merit at all, is it at least interesting, does it have a little bit of value as a theory even if implausible etc..
It's so hard to get beyond the cacophony of people pushing pro or anti this or that these days, a dispassionate look at it by someone qualified, under the assumption of good faith acting on the Weinstein's part would be welcome.
I'm very surprised that Vice magazine which I would consider part of the alt-right dark web posted this article whining about Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Rogan. Aren't they all on the same team? I'm not worried. I think once Mr. Rogan has had a chance to fully digest the recently released paper, he will work with the editors of Vice magazine to provide the world's physics community with a compelling critique of these new ideas.
“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
53 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] thread> In these interviews, Weinstein laments that the scientific community is dismissive of GU because he has not released a technical paper, but insists that scientists should be able to understand the substantive content of GU from the lecture alone
This is alarm bells territory. There's nothing there.
Baez should update this list to include: 20 points for publishing your theory only on YouTube.
> 20 points for emailing me and complaining about the crackpot index. (E.g., saying that it "suppresses original thinkers" or saying that I misspelled "Einstein" in item 8.)
In a technical field such as physics or mathematics, "the technical details" are at minimum of paramount importance, and perhaps even constitute everything of importance. You can't cry victimhood over your colleagues not filling in the gaps and taking care of the "technical" problems for you (presumably with the credit flowing to you anyway). Now that he is very wealthy, I don't see why he couldn't hire a few young physicists to do this work for him, if he had enough confidence in his idea, btw.
Horrible attitude which puts him in crank territory, imho.
I never said that it would. I have nothing bad to say about Newton, either--- either personally or otherwise. I'm not sure about the exact meaning of the term, "asshat", and I don't care to research it, though.
You literally attributed his 'horrible attitude' to putting him in 'crank territory' i.e. 'Common synonyms for crank include crackpot and kook.'
I'm in no position to comment on the nature of his work, but there's an unhealthy amount of ad-hominem here. Maybe it's fair to speculate a bit but I don't think we can just say 'bad attitude -> crap science' etc..
You get this from where?
Papers commonly have multiple authors. Why would it be an issue to have multiple people work on different aspects of it? Being shunned from your department for personal reasons without consideration on the merit of the theory is an entirely different matter.
There are much, much better reasons to be skeptical and critical of authorities and institutions. I feel connecting his theory to this general attitude serves to marginally discredit the latter in net. Which is why a group like Vice would pounce on a story like this.
Slight bias should not entail preventing you defending your PhD thesis or throwing you out of the department.
> I feel connecting his theory to this general attitude serves to marginally discredit the latter in net. Which is why a group like Vice would pounce on a story like this.
I wonder how you would react if your life's work resulted you in being outcast from your community and not even given a chance to defend yourself. It is so easy to have no compassion from people you do not know personally. Maybe you should look in the mirror to find some more instances of horrible attitude.
Compare to Mochizuki, who is in fact a career mathematician, but is also having trouble finding support.
I see a guy empathetically admitting his technical faults, and who also seems to be bullied out of academia.
Einstein was notoriously technically weak and this is not entirely uncommon in many fields.
I disagree with your assessment that he believes the 'details are irrelevant' (admittedly, I listened for a few minutes at your link and he didn't say that), rather it would seem logically that at least as a 'first step' the details are not - intuition usually comes before the details.
Unless you have actual evidence that he really believes his ideas should be accepted purely on the basis of their conceptual novelty irrespective of their technical merit, I don't think it's fair to put words in his mouth. (Maybe your link was to the wrong spot?).
I don't know what to make of it - it seems on one hand like a giant 'attention scheme' PR campaign, on another like a man down his own rabbit hole, but I sense on some level there's some good faith however lacking in self-awareness there may be on his own behalf.
None of the commenters here as of the time I've written this seem to be willing to take it on at face value, granted, very few people could, but still, we seem to be posting ad-hominem instead of references to serious discussions of the work.
If it's quackery then hopefully it should be obviously outed as that. If there's 'something' there, even some legit neat ideas, that should be recognized as well.
Edit: I should add, I'm entirely sympathetic to anyone willing to take a serious stab at hard problems. There's no way this guy is actually devious, at worst he lacks self awareness, but there's at least Art in that. As long as people are not taking up research money with 'quackery' then it's great that people are storming the gates of the unknown.
> ∗The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician (...) This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from without express permission of the author. ©Eric R Weinstein, 2021, All Rights Reserved."[0]
Given such a glaring admission, I'm surprised at the pushback the parent comment is getting. Or is it worded like this for some obscure, legal reason?
[0] https://geometricunity.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/Geometric...
I don't think you can consider Sabine a critic that understands what [s]he's talking about. She is a popularizer of science but hasn't produced anything to suggest she's near the top of her field. And she has some really fringe ideas, like the support of super-determinism.
I do think her guest poster Timothy Nguyen came across as knowing what he's talking about.
She's better known for her criticism of the process of physics, a thing which is both correct and somewhat irritating (because it's not really a secret and she's not offering useful solutions). But she is a genuine physicist as well as a popularizer.
> She's as qualified as pretty much anybody else who's going to appear in public to talk about such things.
Not at all. There are thousands of people who clearly have a much deeper understanding of fundamental physics and some of them are popularizers too. Lenny Susskind is a good example. Peter Shor, who sometimes comments on her blog. There are plenty of bloggers who aren't famous.
It is almost certainly rubbish, and anybody could probably tell him that. It's probably not worth the time of anybody anywhere near the cutting edge, just a blogger who wants the attention.
On the off chance it's actually correct, the person to affirm that it's correct is almost certainly not a popularizer at all. It'll be some obscure academics who see the merit and fill in the details -- which will be read by the popularizers and translated. But if I were one of them I wouldn't start sharpening my pencils yet.
It certainly matters how well they understand the material for being able critique a new approach. And there is a big difference in understanding throughout the field – people are not interchangeable.
Sabine hasn't said anything that would indicate she knows why Erik's theory won't work, unlike the post by Nguyen.
It gives me the Crown Sterling sponsored talk at Black Hat feelz.
Weinstein. Einstein. Now there was a paper writer he could write four papers in a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers
Yikes.
In this particular instance, a scientific theory is not copyrightable, but a paper describing said theory definitely is. Sci-Hub is in hot water precisely because copyright on papers is a thing.
If you wanted to exercise ownership rights on a theory itself, your best bet would be patent law. Patents apply to ideas, but only within the realm of making actual objects. Abstract ideas like scientific theories are usually not patentable, except for the realm of software. Software patents typically cover algorithms and thus mathematical concepts, and since software is a way for mathematical principles to enter commerce, it's probably your only way. (This is also why software patents are so controversial: It's the closest thing to "denying others access to an idea" that we have in our current system of law.)
Disclaimer: IANAL either.
At very minimum, this is a giant PR move.
When was the last time you saw someone use the release of a paper to build up their email marketing list?
Because of this man's side-story problems which may lead many to be cynical and laden his work with a kind of political or emotional criticism, it would be interesting just to hear the dispassionate on it, i.e. does it have any merit at all, is it at least interesting, does it have a little bit of value as a theory even if implausible etc..
It's so hard to get beyond the cacophony of people pushing pro or anti this or that these days, a dispassionate look at it by someone qualified, under the assumption of good faith acting on the Weinstein's part would be welcome.