Cheering Him On

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When an outsider comes up with a "breakthrough" in a specialized area, the natural reaction of the experts is to pooh-pooh the discovery. Why haven't we heard of this guy, what are his credentials, what did he publish, etc. are all questions commonly leveled at the interloper, usually with good reason; rarely do these so-called breakthroughs pan out.

Nevertheless, there's great appeal in the someone-who-comes-out-of-nowhere story. It gives hope to all of us that it is possible to master knowledge or skill in a new area (for us), and we enjoy watching the discomfiture of the proud lions in the field. This phenomenon may be happening in the rarefied air of theoretical physics.

Eric Weinstein gave a lecture at Oxford in which he outlined a theory that he has apparently been working on for a number of years. [It] is an attempt at a Theory of Everything — specifically, a theory that would unify the standard model of particle physics with general relativity, explain dark matter and dark energy, and basically provide a synthesis that would resolve many of the big questions facing physics today.

This sort of thing is always exciting. But this proposal gained particular attention for the fact that Eric Weinstein is not a Physics professor. Yes, he has a PhD in math from Harvard, but he has been out of academia for twenty years, and his day job is at a hedge fund in New York.

The greatest minds from Einstein to Hawking have been struggling to construct the Theory of Everything, and it's very unlikely that a non-physicist has come up with major new insights, much less The Answer. Of course, it was more unlikely that, just over a hundred years ago, a Swiss patent-office clerk would revolutionize the way we look at the universe.

Very few can follow what Eric Weinstein is doing, but many are cheering him on. © 2013 Stephen Yuen