Even wealthy people can be crackpots

I saw Cody at Some More News talking about the rich people who are dealing with the pandemic in rich people ways. So Gwyneth Paltrow is buying an expensive custom face mask and jetting off to some exotic place to avoid the problems (she thinks). Grifters are setting up luxurious get-aways for the wealthy to get away…in groups. It’s all very Masque of the Red Death, and one can only hope it ends in the same way for them.

And then there’s Eric Weinstein. Sheesh. He’s supposed to be a smart guy? He does this rambling monolog about “Covid, new physics, and our need to get off the planet” and you just have to laugh. What a buffoon…except of course that he has a lot of money and is beloved by the Intellectual Dork Web.

To paraphrase his message, in case you don’t want to sit through that mess: humanity has been very lucky so far, but the lucky streak has ended and COVID-19 has put the world’s economic systems at risk. We should be asking why we’re so ill-prepared, why we have so few ventilators and hospital beds.

This is an insane risk to be taking with the world’s economy. People are accused of being racist if they call it the Wuhan virus and talk about travel bans.

“What should we do if the economy collapses?” he asks. He’s very concerned about The Economy.

This is where it all goes off the rails. To continue to paraphrase: He insists that we’ve got to get off of this planet. He admits that people called him crazy on the Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro shows when he said that. This virus should have been grown in a lab and escaped. We’re not going to be wise enough to rethink. Are we going to have to reboot from tardigrades?

No, really, he said that. I guess he thinks “we”, whatever he means by that, might die off, and “we” will have to restart as tardigrades. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Then he dismisses Elon’s idea of going to Mars, because it’s too marginal. The moon is too bleak for a colony. The only place with abundant opportunity is the far cosmos.

Wait, what? He doesn’t think there’s any place in the solar system to go (I agree), but he thinks we’ve desperately got to get off the planet (I disagree. He’s nuts). So we’re going to have to take off and travel to other star systems. Again, he uses “we” a lot. Who is “we”? Is he going to bring 8 billion people along with him in his space ship?

So, he points out, we’re trapped by Einsteinian physics, so he casually suggests we just have to invent a new physics. Just like that. Oh, Elon Musk going to Mars is crazy, but coming up with a new physics that lets Eric Weinstein do what he wants, that’s sensible.

That gets us about 8 minutes into him talking at his phone, less than halfway through, and you might expect that the rest would be talking about his New Physics, but no. He asks if he has enough of an audience to talk about his new ideas, and the rest of it is him mumbling at people in the chat and rambling on about how scientists and academia are close-minded and wrong, and how he wasn’t even allowed to attend his own thesis defense. Well, if this is how he defends his ideas, I sympathize with his committee.

It’s both infuriating and entertaining — this bozo is one of the leading lights of the IDW? Wikipedia puts his claims of a “new physics” in an enlightening context.

In May 2013, Weinstein gave a colloquium, Geometric Unity, promoted by Marcus du Sautoy as a potential unified theory of physics. His equation-less 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. They were unable to debate more intensely due to the fact that there was no published paper.

Yep, total crackpot.

Another perk for my Patreon patrons

For patrons only, I’m going to post the YouTube videos I’m doing for my courses during this period of isolation. Note that these are rough, I’m not doing any fancy editing at all, and abbreviated. I’m aiming too keep them under 15 minutes, and then they are supplemented by discussion sessions on Zoom…and by the textbook, of course.

I have to whip out a couple of these every week so when I say rough, I mean rough — they’re just recordings of Keynote presentations. Normally I’d hope to be interacting with students and handling questions and throwing out problems to solve, and these 10-15 minute summaries would expand out to an hour, but we gotta do what we gotta do during this pandemic.