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This is going to be awkward.  Okay I want to talk about Eric Weinstein. Because. People keep asking me  to talk about Eric Weinstein. And I think it’s somewhat insulting, really. They  should be asking him to talk about me. More seriously. I watched this recent episode  of Eric and Sean Carrol on Piers Morgan, and read the comments from all those who piled  on afterwards. And boy was this ugly. I can’t believe the f*cking hypocrisy of these people.  So that’s why I finally want to talk about Eric. I’ve known Eric for almost 20 years. He’s a good  guy. If you take away one thing from this video, let it be that Sabine said Eric’s a good  and fairly normal person. In contrast to a lot of others who think it’s okay to  sh*t on people they know nothing about. I have seen an enormous amount of hate  thrown at Eric that he doesn’t deserve. In case you managed to miss Carrollgate,  I don’t want you to get away with it, so let me fill you in. Eric has a theory of everything, like all other people I know. His  is called “geometric unity”. He’s been talking about this already 20  years ago, it’s his life’s work, basically. In 2021 he wrote up some notes about  it. Physicists were not particularly impressed. I never looked into this in any detail  because I’m not interested in unification ideas and think it’s a waste of time. I  don’t see why the fundamental forces of nature have to be unified, and I have no  idea why so many people are obsessed with this. But I want to try and give you  a brief idea what this is all about. The standard model of particle physics is  based on symmetries, and these symmetries are defined by groups. The ones for the standard  model are called U(1), SU(2) and SU(3). Don’t worry if you don’t know what this is or how it  works, the only thing that matters is that 1, 2 and 3 are fairly small numbers. Now what you can do is you can look for a bigger group, one with a bigger number  basically, and try to find the standard model in this group. If you manage to do this,  you have a candidate for a “unified theory”. The problem is there are infinitely many groups  and almost all of them contain the standard model groups. Consequently physicists have  proposed thousands of these unified theories. Since these large groups usually contain  more than just the standard model, unified theories all predict new particles,  and then you have to come up with some reason for why we haven’t seen these or  postulate that they make up dark matter, and the usual stuff that hasn’t worked  since the 1980s. This hopefully explains why I am unexcited about yet another unified  something. We have too many of those already, it hasn’t worked for 40 years, and there’s  no evidence supporting any of this. Eric sees this differently, he thinks that  no one has yet done it the right way which is possible, and if this is how he wants  to spend his life that is fine with me. I won’t attempt to explain  exactly what Eric is doing, I’ll just try to give you my stupid girl summary. Einstein’s theories work with a four-dimensional space time. The space time is described  by what is called the metric tensor, that measures the relations between directions.  So the metric tensor has 4 times 4 equals 16 entries. But it’s symmetric, so only  10 of those entries are different. You can just ignore all the words you didn’t  understand, the number 10 is the relevant part. It just so happens that one of the first and  probably most studied groups for unification is SO(10), and that also has a 10 in it.  So Eric postulates that these two 10s are somehow related. Basically he doubles the  gravitational part of Einstein’s theory, and takes the one version to be the generator of  this group that gives you something like SO(10). Devil is in the details. By this I mean that  in all fairness Eric idea is a big sketchy. But honestly I don’t doubt what with some  effort you can somehow make the maths work. So that is roughly what Eric is working  on. It’s all fairly unremarkable really. The mathematics is pretty close to what  physicists are using already, and it’s totally in line with all the other nonsense  that physicists in the foundations now work on. But for reasons I don’t quite understand a  lot of people find this all very interesting, which is how Eric ended up on Piers Morgan  with Sean Carroll. And this happened. [Sean:] “The good news is I have read  Eric's paper. Here it is. I actually have it here. Right here. And it's  worse than you would think. You know, it it's not serious. It's a dog ate my homework  kind of thing. If you have a dark matter thing, if you have a dark matter prediction,  if you have a dark energy prediction, I want to see a plot in the paper. I want  to see red shift versus distance. I want to see a calculation of a relic abundance so I  can figure out how much dark matter there’s supposed to be. If you do that, people will pay  attention to the theory. It's very possible.” [Eric:] “Sean, first of all, um, how dare you?  Second of all, if you're going to go of the… No, Sean. How dare you cast shade and  dispersions of the kind that I wouldn't seek to cast on you, but I will now.  Uh, okay. I'm not seeking your favour, nor do I need to seek your approval.  As you know, you failed to gain tenure.” I think one has to give credits to Sean that  he agreed to do this because the vast majority of physicists would have chickened out.  And honestly, Sean did a pretty good job. Yes, Eric’s work is far from complete, yes he  doesn’t have a Lagrangian and he hasn’t actually solved any problem and he hasn’t explained  how anomaly cancellation works and other than some handwavy “there ought to be new particles  somewhere” he doesn’t have tangible predictions. But then Eric is only one person who  wrote up some notes. If he had wasted some millions of tax money on hiring postdocs  and writing papers about it then he could have easily papered over these shortcomings,  just like everyone else in that area. And this is why this pisses me off so much.  Sean totally knows that most of his colleagues work on similarly flaky stuff, it’s just  been covered up by more working hours. The literature is full of papers without  proper predictions without Lagrangians, ill-defined operators or problems that will be  solved in some “future work” that never comes. Sean knows that. Everyone in the damned field know  that. But normally, no one’s saying anything about it. Because they’re all tied up in the same scam.  Unless the person who comes up with the idea is Eric Weinstein, in which case it’s suddenly  hugely offensive and everyone starts yelling. Well Sean why don’t you talk for a little bit  about all those supposed AdS/CFT “predictions” for condensed matter this or that which were  supposed to revolutionize superconductivity. Whatever happened to that? And just exactly how  is string theory defined anyway? Did they actually ever solve the problem of quantum gravity, like  did they ever prove it’s finite? What Calabi Yau manifold are we talking about again? Or how  about Loop Quantum Gravity, do they have a well-defined Hamiltonian, where is the classical  limit. And these are areas in which thousands of people have spent decades and billions of  dollars. Why aren’t you talking about this rather than crapping on Eric who is one single  person and at least trying to do something new. They say they want people to “think outside  the box” but if someone actually does it, they’re like “nah not this way”. You don’t  talk like us, you don’t walk like us, we don’t like the people you play with.  Therefore, we will not look at your ideas. This is the sorry state of  theoretical physics now. And then you get all these people piling onto each  hate parade. The group think is SO thick. Like, they all think it’s fine to hate on Eric because  they expect their colleagues to cheer on them for doing so. And those who think that maybe  Eric’s idea isn’t so bad keep their mouth shut. Like with this recent episode about Perimeter  Institute. In his morgan appearance, Eric said vaguely he’s been visiting some  physics institute and giving a talk. Someone leaked later that this was Perimeter Institute  and spread a rumour that they didn’t want to be associated with him and that they made a  deal that Eric would donate money in return. This is all bullsh*t. And if they’d  stopped and thought for just a second, they’d have known it’s bullsh*t. This  just isn’t how seminar invitations work. Also, let me tell you that when I give talks  I frequently do not mention publicly where I am going for… reasons. I also know that  Eric has been giving a bunch of physics lectures in the past years about which you find  nothing online. Presumably also for… reasons. The story from Perimeter Institute is  to my understanding that the person who invited him feared for their career. This  tells you how sick this entire community is that people are afraid to do as much  as express interest in a new theory. Then there’s Brian Keating who deserves credit  for not chickening out and for standing with Eric, even though that made people crap on Brian too. Then there is Curt Jaimungal who courageously  published a very long video about Eric’s theory and also interviewed Eric which  lead to this following exchange [Curt:] “What you've done is remarkable, man.” [Eric:]: “I don't even know how to deal with that to be honest. Look, thank you.” And again you know I saw people jump  on Curt and criticising him just for talking to Eric. But you know,  Curt it’s right. It’s remarkable. Eric’s idea is as remarkable as the ideas  of thousands of other people, each of whom has spent years and years of their life on it,  and whom you have never heard anything about. In any case, I think what’s really happening  here is that a lot of people who work in the foundations of physics are very afraid  that Eric is exposing how rotten their entire field is. This is why they’re trying  hard to discredit him. But the truth is that that Eric’s idea isn’t any better or worse  than all the other crap they’re working on, the only difference is that he hasn’t  wasted as much of your tax money on it. That’s it for today. No, there’s no sponsor on  this video because I don’t want to be accused of monetizing a friendship, but please  check out my Patreon. Thanks for watching.