I can only speak for sure about what he's said about physics.
The fundamental problem with talking about highly technical things (like theories of everything) to a popular audience is that it's totally one-sided: he could spout nonsense and none of his listeners would have the slightest chance of noticing, as long as it sounded complicated enough. It's just like how you could talk somebody tech illiterate into installing malware.
I don't know about his other opinions, but for nontechnical topics, the audience can check for themselves whether the conclusions make sense. So if you think they do, it's probably fine.
Regardless if he’s wrong, what he’s saying sounds interesting even to a physics PhD I’d imagine.
The scientific community doesn’t know why there’s 3 generations of particles, heck I’ve barely heard anyone in my life even mention the fact. It’s a curious thing and his theory was at least infinitely better than 99% of the content on the Internet.
I don’t really understand what he said (and a paper won’t help me) but it made me think in different ways.
He conceded he may be wrong, that he may be crazy, but he also has a PhD in mathematical physics. A charlatan typically declares he is right, often by divine right or unreasonable skill level. Eric’s just exploring ideas from his perspective.
I think hyper-criticizing him is more dangerous for intellectual thought than him inspiring millions of potential minds with fantastical descriptions that may be wrong. Some of what he’s saying is undoubtedly true.
Well, let me assume you're a software engineer. Suppose that one day you heard of some smooth talker who was going around pushing their vision of an AI-powered cloud blockchain as a service, or whatever. And everything they were saying just seemed empty: they would deliver the same polished, mindblowing speech about how this would revolutionize the world and topple all other software companies, but they hadn't written a single line of code, or even a whitepaper. And yet they were eloquent enough to end up with an audience of millions and billions in funding, exceeding the sum total of everybody doing real work in the area. And every time you tried to tell anybody about the real work you were actually doing, they would ask "but what do you think about the block cloudchain thing?"
That's what the situation is like for actual physicists. There's people who do the actual work, there's people who are famous for claiming to have done great things, and there's very little overlap between these two sets.
(Also, there's an "imprinting" effect here. For example, in the scientific community, we talk all the time about why there are only 3 generations. It's one of many, many mysteries that everybody is always aware of. You might have heard it from Weinstein first, but people really have spent enormous effort investigating the question. And a flashy self-promoter tends to erase those people.)
Ok but he’s held very intellectual conversations with physicists so I can only infer he has a basic fundamental knowledge — despite the ego and fantastical colorful language.
And I heard about the 3 generations when I was a freshman in HS in AP physics and I wrote a sci-fi story on it. Obviously it’s a widely known problem, I assumed people would understand me.
I’m defending the public sphere, promoting thoughtful ideas and intellectual adventures. Most people still don’t know who Elon Musk is yet it seems like they would. I want the average person to know the great open questions in physics.
Other professionals, hackers and those with PhDs in mathematical physics can contribute something novel and true to the future of understanding physics. No one owns mystery or the right to explore it.
Even if it’s just an artist or mathematician inspiring a physicist to understand an idea that could lead to something unrelated but true. Or public support to increase scientific funding.
I also work with a physicist who probably would criticize my perspective here. He has analyzed and critiqued pseudoscientific claims for national security reasons. So my experience here isn’t non-existent.
And I’m not a software engineer. I was a hacker. I like to reverse engineer things and understand the world through first principles...
> what he’s saying sounds interesting even to a physics PhD I’d imagine
Why would you imagine that?
> The scientific community doesn’t know why there’s 3 generations of particles, heck I’ve barely heard anyone in my life even mention the fact.
Your random encounters with information are not a good guide here. The generatation issue is often described as one of the main open problems in particle physics.
Physicists want to forbid people from exploring ‘philosophies of sciences’ in public? You can only discuss official ideas codified by peer review?
And of course it’s one of the main open problems. Obviously people in the community discuss it and it’s widely known. I meant in general, all the people talking sports, politics, business, finance, technology and reality TV, you know 99% of human communication, never ever discuss any ideas interesting in physics. Maybe because the authoritarians motivate normal people to avoid it thus only charlatans and a few science popularizers drive public awareness.
And I meant some of the math and physics he’s describing are true. I’m not saying his theories are true but not all his perspectives on them are unfounded. He’s had highly intellectual conversations with physicists on his podcast. Including Penrose. And Lisi, whom he strongly criticized.
My point is, he doesn’t need a license to talk and the criticism towards new ideas is wrong. Plus we need more cool ideas in the public sphere, right or wrong.
The secret that is rarely revealed in pop science discussions is that theories of everything are cheap. To count as a theory of everything, you just need to come up with any mathematical structure big enough to cram the Standard Model plus a graviton in. And adding mathematical structure, especially when you're playing around, is easy, like snapping legos together. In this way, you can crank out ten theories of everything a week if you want to.
So how do we decide what is worth actually taking seriously? First, you need to establish that your theory actually reproduces the Standard Model plus gravity at low energies, i.e. that it doesn't blatantly fail to match the something we already know. (Most ideas fail here.) Then, you need to show that your proposal is actually mathematically self-consistent. (Most remaining ideas fail here.) Then, you need to work on the finer details, i.e. making sure you don't accidentally predict large deviations from the Standard Model that contradict observation, and match what we know about quantum gravity already at the semiclassical level. (Everything except for string theory fails by this point.) And then finally, you need to be able to extract sharp predictions from your theory -- and this is quite hard, because a complicated theory tends to have a lot of knobs to twiddle, making the predictions ambiguous. (Nobody has gotten this far.) And even if you pass all of these checks, there's a high chance the predictions will be wrong anyway, because nature's not our slave.
Weinstein's theory has not even gotten past step zero. He hasn't provided enough technical detail to calculate anything, there's just nothing there at all. Yet he made a huge media push to get recognized as "the next Einstein". It's like saying your startup is the next Google before writing a single line of code, and having the public believe you.
You have a couple threads going in here, so maybe you tacked this to the wrong one. You said you could speak for sure about things he'd said about physics, so I'm asking for those specifics.
These are the specifics. There isn't enough there there in his theory to have anything more to criticize. That is, it's too vague to even do the zeroth-order tests physicists would use to decide whether to take it seriously.
(You could criticize the little there is on aesthetic or philosophical grounds. I tried to avoid this because that's subjective, but it is true that there is a great deal more arbitrariness in his construction than in alternatives. For example, string theory also has a lot of extra dimensions, but the number of them is fixed by internal consistency. It wasn't just made up.)
It seems that there has (a) been no paper, so his theories remain too vague to even properly criticize, but (b) as far as people can tell from the vagueness, his theory predicts the existence of particles that the LHC should have detected but has not.
