Eric Weinstein facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Eric Weinstein
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Eric Ross Weinstein
October 26, 1965 Los Angeles, California, U.S.
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| Education | University of Pennsylvania (BA) Harvard University (MA, PhD) |
| Occupation | Podcast host, former investment fund director |
| Known for | Intellectual dark web |
| Spouse(s) | Pia Malaney |
| Relatives | Bret Weinstein (brother) |
Eric Ross Weinstein (/ˈwaɪnstaɪn/; born October 26, 1965) is an American podcast host. 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.
Contents
Education
Weinstein received his PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard University in 1992 under the supervision of Raoul Bott. 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.
Career
Physics
Weinstein was invited to a colloquium by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy at Oxford University's Clarendon Laboratory 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. 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.
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, 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."
Weinstein is a member of the research team on The Galileo Project headed by Avi Loeb.
Intellectual dark web
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.
