Eric Weinstein


Eric Ross Weinstein is an American managing director of Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel's investment firm, a position he has held since 2015. He and his brother Bret Weinstein coined the term Intellectual Dark Web to refer to an informal group of pundits.

Education

Weinstein received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from the Mathematics Department at Harvard University in 1992 under the supervision of Raoul Bott. In his dissertation, titled "Extension of Self-Dual Yang-Mills Equations across the Eighth Dimension", Weinstein showed that the self-dual Yang–Mills equations were not really peculiar to dimension four and admitted generalizations to higher dimensions.

Career

Physics

In May 2013, Weinstein gave a colloquium talk, Geometric Unity, promoted by Marcus du Sautoy as a potential unified theory of physics, an event covered by The Guardian. His unpublished theory includes an "observerse," a 14-dimensional space, and predictions for undiscovered particles which he stated could account for dark matter. Joseph Conlon of the University of Oxford stated that some of these particles, if they existed, would already have been detected in existing accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider.
Few physicists attended and no preprint, paper, or equations were published. Weinstein's ideas were not widely debated. The few that did engage expressed skepticism. Science writer Jennifer Ouellette criticized the promotion of Weinstein's colloquium in an article for Scientific American, arguing that the ideas could not be properly vetted by experts because there was no published paper.

Intellectual dark web

Weinstein said he coined the term "Intellectual Dark Web" after his brother, Bret Weinstein, resigned from The Evergreen State College in response to a campus controversy. The term is used to describe a number of academics and podcast hosts.

''The Portal''

In June 2019, Weinstein launched a podcast called The Portal. As Weinstein explained on The Joe Rogan Experience, the title refers to fictional events such as the rabbit hole in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Platform Nine and Three-Quarters in Harry Potter, when a "humdrum existence in an ordinary world" is disrupted by traveling through "some sort of magical portal."