Eric Weinstein

Eric Ross Weinstein (born October 26, 1965) is an American investor and financial executive. , he is managing director for the American venture capital firm Thiel Capital. Weinstein coined the term "intellectual dark web" and has proposed a theory of everything called "Geometric Unity" that has largely been met with skepticism in the scientific community.

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

Finance
In 2013, while promoting his theory of everything, Weinstein was working as an economist and consultant at the Natron Group, a New York City–based hedge fund. , Weinstein is the managing director for Thiel Capital, a venture capital firm founded by American financier Peter Thiel that invests in technology and life sciences–related companies.

Theory of everything
Weinstein was invited to give a lecture at Oxford University's Clarendon Laboratory in May 2013, where he presented his proposed theory of everything called "Geometric Unity". The lecture was organized by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, who also wrote an overview of the theory for The Guardian newspaper. Physicists expressed skepticism about the theory and criticized Weinstein for not submitting his ideas for peer review, which is standard in the scientific community.

Physicist Joseph Conlon of Oxford stated that some of the new subatomic particles predicted by Weinstein would already have been detected in existing accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider. Science writer Jennifer Ouellette criticized the favorable coverage given to the theory by The Guardian, arguing that experts could not properly evaluate Weinstein's ideas because there was no published paper.

In April 2021, Weinstein released a draft paper on Geometric Unity in a guest appearance on the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. Weinstein qualified in his paper that he "is not a physicist," but an "entertainer" and podcast host. It received strong criticism from some in the scientific community. Timothy Nguyen, whose PhD thesis intersects with Weinstein's work, said what Weinstein has presented so far has "gaps, both mathematical and physical in origin" that "jeopardize Geometric Unity as a well-defined theory, much less one that is a candidate for a theory of everything."

Other ventures
, Weinstein hosts a podcast called The Portal. He is a member of the research team on The Galileo Project headed by Avi Loeb.

Personal life
Weinstein coined the name "intellectual dark web" to refer to himself and his brother, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein. The latter Weinstein resigned from his teaching position at Evergreen State College in 2017 in the wake of controversy over the college's "Day of Absence" for white students and faculty.