Dennis Hackethal’s Blog
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A Comprehensive Guide to Eric Weinstein’s Paper on Geometric Unity
Eric Weinstein recently published a working draft of a paper on a theory he first proposed in 2013, called “Geometric Unity.” It is supposed to be a “unified theory of physics.” As far as I know, this is the first thing he has written about his theory.
So that you don’t need to read all 69 pages, here’s the comprehensive guide:
Read the opening quote of the introduction, i.e. the problem statement, and be delighted by its clarity:
“What really interests me is whether god had any choice in the creation of the world.” -Albert Einstein to Ernst Strauss
Read the first sentence of the introduction, if you can, and be startled by its obscurantism:
In the beginning we will let X4 be a 4-dimensional C∞ manifold with a chosen orientation and unique spin structure.
Realize that Weinstein is not in the business of solving problems but impressing his peers. Stop reading and resume whatever you were doing before.
Update 2021-10-05: Saying Weinstein wants to impress his peers was a mistake. He’s trying to impress his fans, most of whom are not his peers, which is precisely why he can manipulate them into feeling inadequate/not worthy of his brilliance. Note in particular that in a footnote on the first page, he writes:
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 […]
“[W]ork[s] of entertainment” are directed at the general public, not physicists.
What people are saying
I just realized that Weinstein published his paper on April 1st, so… I hope it’s not just an April Fools’ joke 😂
This is quite common in theoretical physics. Here’s the first sentence of Ed Witten’s most cited paper, for instance: “To understand the large N behavior of gauge theories with SU(N) gauge group is a longstanding problem, and offers perhaps the best hope of eventually understanding the classic strong coupling mysteries of QCD.” Technical papers are aimed other physicists, not the general public. I have no idea about the actual merits of Weinstein’s paper, but calling it obscurantist misses the mark.
I don’t think Weinstein is addressing physicists. In a footnote on the first page, he writes:
He calls his paper a “work of entertainment”. Hence it is aimed at a general audience, specifically the audience of his podcast, most of whom he knows won’t understand him. I think “obscurantism” captures it aptly.
Eric Weinstein’s game is to use subterfuge, to make himself sound smart.
He begins with a sentence stuffed with real mathematical terms, in correct context (but which intentionally may be unintelligible), then in the next sentence he encodes a different concept from mathematics or physics or philosophy (or nonsense), however the two sentences have no conceptual link. Then he implies that he has just introduced a “novel connection” between the two sentences/concepts. There is no connection. It is implied, hinted at subtly, and amounts to nothing if one had the patience to make him explain (and walk with him through his “explanation”).
He does this in his daily life. Those who know him are frustrated. They hear his long-winded sentences that mean nothing. They see some people, mostly the naive, get enraptured by doublespeak and speaking in tongues.
This is what charlatans do. They use believable language on the edge of comprehension, to say fringe nonsense that – to naive believers or sycophants – appears as “revolutionary words” or “genius talk” or even “magical”.
https://youtu.be/HdZ9weP5i68
@Shane: Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SGV3ctLlu4
To think that Lennon could have had virtually any pussy he wanted. Yet he chose that one. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
I am a theoretical physicist.
I’m not a fan of geometric unity; I think it’s poorly motivated.
However, your second criticism is bad. The sentence you quoted about a “four-dimensional manifold with a chosen orientation and a unique spin structure” isn’t actually obscurantism: That’s just how mathematicians talk. His statement has a perfectly precise meaning, which anyone with a background in graduate-level differential geometry (a cohort which includes many theoretical physicists) would understand.
LMF,
As I wrote in a previous comment:
You wrote:
First, I made a mistake: I originally wrote Weinstein is interested in “impressing his peers” (emphasis added). He’s not – he’s interested in impressing his fans, most of whom aren’t his peers, which is exactly the problem. I’m claiming that he’s using math lingo his target audience doesn’t understand to impress them. Target audiences for “work[s] of entertainment” consist mostly of laymen, whom he specifically addresses, and only of few mathematicians or theoretical physicists.
However, I didn’t claim that mathematicians don’t talk like that, or that what he says is vague. (Academic obscurantism is often vague/hard to pin down but I didn’t claim that in this case.) If we were addressing his actual peers (not wannabe peers like his fans), I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
You’d still be able to tell that what Weinstein wrote is obscurantist if you weren’t a theoretical physicist. In fact, you might be better suited to tell if you weren’t because it would be more jarring to you.
You misquoted Weinstein btw.
Note: Generally, a necessary condition for labeling writing as obscurantist should be that it expresses an idea in language that is more obscure than actually required. In Weinstein’s case, the very nature of his idea is such that it starts in an extremely technical place: he is trying to create a unified geometrical setting that contains the three main mathematical structures used in quantum field theory and general relativity (gauge connections, spinors, and Levi-Civita connections). So Geometric Unity is obscure by its very nature.
It’s pretty clear if you’ve ever heard Weinstein interviewed about this that Geometric Unity is not actually intended to be a work of entertainment. He literally thinks his theory is true, and he has said he hopes the release of a paper will help make his idea known in the physics community. The comment about this being a “work of entertainment” is meant in a tounge-and-cheek way: As explained in the previous paragraph, there’s just not a way to make stuff like this non-obscure to laypeople, and surely he knows that.
Not to people who study that stuff, as you said yourself. But again, he doesn’t address those people.
Works of entertainment can be true and clear. There’s no conflict there.
Him knowing that is a prerequisite for his capitalizing on it to impress his fans.
Speaking of what’s “pretty clear if you’ve ever heard Weinstein interviewed” – about other topics, too – he uses obscurantist language in verbal discussions as well. For example, when asked about Bitcoin’s “most interesting property”, he responded:
What the fuck is he talking about?
His obscurantism isn’t hard to find. This is the first interview I picked off of YouTube at random, and this quote is from the first time he talks. People will have no idea what he just said, but they’ll think they heard something profound they’re just not smart enough to understand. One commenter wrote:
While somebody else wrote:
So impressing people this way actually works. In another interview, the second one I picked at random, the interviewer praises him in front of the live audience:
LOL.
Yeah, okay, good points. I definitely don’t want to make the case that he’s not an obscurantist in general. In his interviews he gives a lot of answers that are very vague and cryptic, but socially signal that he’s a “profound” thinker.
I just don’t think that his obscurantism can truly be inferred from the single sentence you provided. (Btw, later parts of his paper are truly hard for me to understand even given my background. When I skimmed through it a few months ago, it didn’t occur to me that this was intentional on his part, but that might indeed be the case).
That isn’t what the first sentence of your link to his paper:
ANTI DE SITTER SPACE AND HOLOGRAPHY
states. His first sentence in that paper is:
“Recently, it has been proposed by Maldacena that large N limits of certain conformal field theories in d dimensions can be described in terms of supergravity (and string theory) on the product of d+1 dimensional AdS space with a compact manifold.”
I tried putting the text into Google as sometimes it can find from that whole pattern the source paper from which it is a quote, but alas it either wasn’t indexed (which might be due to it being behind an academic pay-wall), or it doesn’t exist. If you know what you meant to link to get the quote to match the source you should reply to my comment.
Provide a single example.
Many have confused the inescapably esoteric for the deliberately obscure. Precise mathematical language is needed to define the structures of Geometric Unity. He can’t be vague and imprecise in order to ensure the layperson is not left behind. His 2013 Oxford Lecture was given to an audience of theoretical physicists and Michael Enciso was there and says that it was well received and Eric talked to notable but unnamed physicists after the lecture and learned that ideas about there possibly being mirror universes had been recently considered, which he didn’t know about as the academic pay-wall limits what papers he is able to read in his spare time.
Eric Weinstein has stated he considers those in the Portal community to be his friends and not fans. You underestimate the Portal community. It has transcribed his entire 2020 video and rendered the equations that he scrawled on the blackboard in typeset form, as well as providing some animations to convey hard to comprehend concepts in Gauge Theory.
Eric has increasingly made episodes of The Portal which are technical without pausing to explain themselves, expecting the smart audience to provide wikis to explain what was said to those who didn’t grasp it.
If this doesn’t suit you fine. I am sure you can find a Cocomelon video which is more your speed.
Eric says in the footnote on the first page of his draft paper:
“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. ©Eric R Weinstein, 2021, All Rights Reserved.”
He has since explained he did this to ensure academic vampires would not try to suck all the blood out of it, by shunning academic peer review and copyrighting his work so that he maintains control over its progress.
<redacted by admin>
If you cut him off mid sentence then it will seem obscure as you made it obscure by truncating it and excluding the following sentence which explores the ramifications of the previous sentence and provides an interpretative context in which to parse the whole idea. Eric is asked:
“I know you’ve been aware of bitcoin for a really long time what do you think is its most interesting property?”
Okay? Straightforward question, let’s see how obscure the answer is"
“Honestly, I think that the most interesting property is that we know that physical reality works, that gold, for example, has worked for ages as a medium of exchange and store of value, and that works by physical principles. The amazing thing about the blockchain and bitcoin was that it emerged to show us that we could have a locally enforced conservation law that mimicked physical reality and allow us to have a locally determined medium of exchange and store of value without requiring some sort of centralized authority. Now, it’s my opinion its flaw is based around the ledger that the blockchain leaves and that is something that is not duplicated in physical reality. So for me the most exciting thing is that we’re beginning to port the rules of physical reality into logical or digital reality and since we know physical reality work it’s pretty exciting that you have an as-if physical reality enforced in a completely logical layer.”
So, you complain about not understanding his answer after omitting 122 words out of 161. That’s 75% of his answer. Gone. No wonder you can’t make sense out of it. All he is saying is that a correspondence now exists between the uniqueness of a Bitcoin and the uniqueness of a Gold coin.
You can’t get reality to copy a Gold coin for you and double your money. You can take a $ and treat it as a number in the Federal Reserve’s own computer and dilute its value by making more $ by adding numbers to the numbers you already have, and therefore do Quantitative Easing, and COVID-19 stimulus payments, and boost inflation as you are all secretly serving Xi Jingping and keen to destroy the US Economy so that the Chinese one seems better globally by comparison, when it has its own problems in its bad building market. Eric notes a flaw in this 1:1 analogy which is that Gold needs no ledger. I have a Gold coin and give it to you and now you have it, and no one needs know the transaction took place, but Bitcoin transactions unavoidably spawn this Blockchain of all their transactions, where the blocks and infrastructure for validating all transactions is kept afloat by the prospect of gaining Bitcoin for mining new blocks. So, it is actually flawed in another way, because it relies on inflation and then it will have a transaction cost once all Bitcoin get to be mined, which could make for a disincentive to transact, and then without it being actively used is it even valuable anymore as the same could be said about the Native Americans attitude to Gold which the settlers ascribed much higher transactional value to, despite a Gold coin not having the inherent utility in that context of a healthy horse.
Uncompetative,
Re #627. I like when people catch misquotes, but you technically misquoted Witten yourself. You replaced a hyphen with a space. Not sure how that happened – did you not copy/paste the quote?
Re #629. You wrote:
He’s going to have to find some solution if he wants to address laymen. He could explain the terms. For example, as a software engineer, when I speak to laymen about programming, I either explain the terms or use analogies they will understand. I can ‘dumb things down’ just enough without compromising on accuracy. And if I do want to talk about more advanced programming topics, I don’t address laymen. Because they’re laymen.
Popper’s and Feynman’s books are great examples of how to speak to laymen on complex issues without compromising on quality.
Not sure how big an obstacle this could present to someone like Weinstein.
Re #630. You wrote:
Friends can be fans. And not all of the hundreds of thousands views and listens he gets online are from the Portal community. Even if all of the people in the Portal community were smart enough to parse his statements, most others in the general populace aren’t.
Public intellectuals shouldn’t rely on others to parse their statements for them. They are responsible for making themselves intelligible. Consider this quote by Ayn Rand:
You made that same moral threat when you accused me of being on the intellectual level of a toddler (“I am sure you can find a Cocomelon video which is more your speed.”). That kind of threat doesn’t impress me, but it does many others, and it’s exactly the kind of tactic Weinstein and his fans, including you, evidently rely upon to spread his ideas.
Re #631. You wrote:
Not a lawyer but I’m not sure someone else could copyright text for him. Or maybe I don’t know enough about academia. Regardless, the goal you mention is compatible with intentional obscurantism.
I have redacted the remainder of #631 because if you’re going to make claims that potentially harm people’s reputation you better provide a source for each claim.
Re #632. You wrote:
I’ve read the added context and I think it does little to aid in understanding him. It also makes a new point, which only adds to the complexity of what he’s saying.
It’s been a while since I quoted that passage so I don’t remember what was going through my mind at the time but I’m a conscientious quoter. I don’t leave out stuff to misrepresent people.
“Hello, you’ve found The Portal. I’m your host, Eric Weinstein, and I think that today’s must be the most unusual episode yet of a podcast that has been marked by almost regular unusual episodes. Now, this is the first podcast that I’m recording at home. I don’t really have a home recording studio, so we’re really doing this from chicken wire and masking tape. But, I am sheltering in place because of the worldwide COVID pandemic, and what we’ve been asked by the state of California and by the federal government is to shelter in place for an upcoming month, because today is April 1st. Now during a pandemic, I can assure you that no one is interested in April Fool’s jokes. So the question is what to do with the April Fool’s tradition in a situation in which nobody wants a prank.” – Introduction to his 2020 video
This video includes footage of the speculative Oxford University lecture where Professor Marcus du Sautoy invited him to present his provisional work in progress ideas on unification. So, although it definitely is weird to release an initial draft paper for a Unified Field Theory on 1st April 2021 on The Joe Rogan Podcast, this is a continuation of the same idea he had where he wanted to start a tradition where April Fool’s day is used as a day where heterodox ideas should be tolerated.
The fact is, the way the mainstream extreme progressive left wing media Biden administration apologist failure of a 4th Estate operates is so toxic to moderate, left of centre, classical enlightment progressives, like Eric that he is painted as Alt-right because the Overton window has shifted so much to the virtue signalling ecosocialist cryptofascist extreme left. Consequently, it simply isn’t going to become a tradition to use April Fool’s Day to present heterodox thought, and I think it is a bizarre quirk of personality that Eric is under the misapprehension that he can even propose “new traditions”.
However, no matter how silly all of this “new tradition” stuff obviously is, and how it would have been far more credible for Eric to announce he welcomed constructive feedback on his draft paper on the more technical Lex Fridman podcast, and actually give an overview of the theory with the aid of a whiteboard, then I think many would still be complaining that he hadn’t submitted to the same process of academic peer review that they had to submit their papers to, but it would have gone a lot better than episode 1628 of The Joe Rogan Podcast where his expository animations couldn’t be seen by much of the audience as they are audio-only consumers of the show.
I have also seen that Eric seems to be bad at “reading the room”, and has this idea that he can innovate pedagogy and part of that involves explaining the essence of PhD level topics like Gauge Invariance with a hair scrunchie, or worse still try to summarise Geometric Unity’s model of the cosmos with a pair of toilet paper cores representing not our 4D spacetime, but a toy 1D circular analogy swept up into cylinders for all possible temporal and spatial dimensional measures of that loop.
This hyper condensed elevator pitch starts with such an unrecognisable scenario in order to be able to leverage props that Dr Sabine Hossenfelder had to tell Eric Weinstein:
“I regret to say if you don’t understand what people find hard to grasp about your ideas maybe you should get a little bit more feedback about just exactly why it is incomprehensible.”
Not only did he oversimplify and condense his summary of Geometric Unity to the verge of incomprehensibility, but he failed to read the room and see that everyone had been invited to talk about what the scope of a Theory of Everything might be, and to not actually use the time to propose what might become a hopeful candidate for one given that it avoid parameterisation like encoding that our universe has a preference for neutrinos with left handed spin properties, and this asymmetry is a choice which requires a parameter, unless there is a deeper theory which has equal amounts of particles with left and right spin properties, which is what he has proposed with his work in progress that aspires to become a Unified Field Theory, but is not going to be a candidate for a Theory of Everything as he doesn’t explain why he starts off with the parameter 4.
In short, you’re suggesting the reason for his incomprehensible style of communication is not obscurantism but social incompetence?
Keep your response short.