Who is Eric Weinstein?

Eric Weinstein is. by occupation, a VC fund manager.

He is also an economist. In 2002 he co--authored a paper (with Adil Abdulali) on the valuation perversities of mortgage-backed securities. That paper looks pretty good in retrospect, after those perversities helped feed in to the crises of 2007-08.

By education, he is a mathematician, having received a Ph.D. in the field from Harvard for a thesis on the extension of self-dual Yang-Mills equations. No, I don't know what that means. I do know something about VC managers and about mortgage backed securities, though, and it's my blog, so I will proceed.

In aspiration anyway, Weinstein is a also a physicist. He has devised what he calls a theory of "Geometric Unity" which he believes may reconcile quantum theory with Einsteinian relativity.

He theory bubbled along in obscurity for some time until somehow it drew attention from television host Piers Morgan. Piers Morgan had Weinstein on his show, coupled with Sean Carroll, a more conventionally credentialed physicist who works out of Caltech.

At any rate, Carroll and Weinstein had a big nasty blow-up that made for great television.

Sabine Hossenfelder, who is usually my guru on this kind of thing, seems to say, (1) most grand unified field theories of the sort Weinstein in working on are useless - part of what she sees as the dead end of contemporary physics, not a solution to it, (2) Weinstein's variant is not an exception to this rule, (2) Carroll made valid points against it, but over-reacted, and since the show Weinstein has been seen as part of the problem -- he is not, (3) Hossenfelder personally respects Weinstein.

Okay, so now you know some things about who is Eric Weinstein. Here is a link to that 2002 article on mortgage derivatives I mentioned above:

https://www.risk.net/sites/default/files/import_unmanaged/risk.net/data/Investor/pdf/june/technical.pdf \

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