Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 In a blog post this summer I discussed Eric Weinstein, a VC manager trained as a mathematician. I said, quite incidentally, that Weinstein received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard with a thesis on the extension of self-dual Yang-Mills equations. I also admitted that I don't know what that means. So, dear reader, let us struggle a bit with what that means. Back in 1954 Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills developed ideas loosely called "gauge symmetry" in order to describe the strong nuclear force. The "strong" nuclear force is the one that has to counter-act electromagnetism at the subatomic level.  That is: two protons stick together in a nucleus even though both are positively charged so, given our understanding of EM, they "ought" to be flying apart.   Yang got his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago in 1948 and thereafter was briefly an assistant to Enrico Fermi. His work with Mills in essence outlined the mathematics of a scenario in whi...

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 Ca...