Eric Weinstein | |
---|---|
Born | Eric Ross Weinstein October 26, 1965 Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
Education | University of Pennsylvania (BA) Harvard University (MA, PhD) |
Occupation(s) | Podcast host, former investment fund director |
Known for | Intellectual dark web |
Spouse | Pia Malaney[1] |
Relatives | Bret Weinstein (brother) |
Eric Ross Weinstein (/ˈwaɪnstaɪn/; born October 26, 1965)[2] is an American podcast host.[a] He was a managing director for Thiel Capital (an American hedge fund) from 2013 until 2022. He has a PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard.[3][1][4][5]
Weinstein received his PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard University in 1992 under the supervision of Raoul Bott.[6][7][8][9][10][11] 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 peculiar to dimension four and admitted generalizations to higher dimensions.[12]
Weinstein left academia after stints at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[citation needed] Weinstein was invited to a colloquium by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy at Oxford University's Clarendon Laboratory in May 2013.[13] There he presented his ideas on a theory of everything called 'Geometric Unity'. Physicists expressed skepticism about the theory.[13][14] 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.[13] 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.[15]
On April 1, 2021, Weinstein released a draft paper on Geometric Unity in a guest appearance on the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. Weinstein qualified in his paper that he "is not a physicist," but an "entertainer" and podcast host. It received strong criticism from some in the scientific community. Timothy Nguyen, whose PhD thesis intersects with Weinstein's work,[b] said what Weinstein has presented so far has "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."[17]
Weinstein is a member of the research team on The Galileo Project headed by Avi Loeb.[18]
Weinstein coined the term "intellectual dark web" and named himself and his brother as members after his brother Bret Weinstein resigned from Evergreen State College, in response to a 2017 campus controversy. The term is used to describe a number of academics and podcast hosts.[19][20]