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Decoding the Gurus

Special Episode: Interview with Tim Nguyen on Geometric Unity

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Science, Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2021

⏱️ 73 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Despite promising to leave Weinstein world for an overdue holiday, Matt and Chris have been lured back by a world shattering theory with a cosmic vision of ultimate unity! We are speaking, of course, about Eric Weinstein's revolutionary theory of everything: 'Geometric Unity'. To help uncover the mysteries embedded deep within this scientific Rosetta stone, Matt and Chris are joined by a special guest Tim Nguyen. Tim is a mathematician and the co-author of a recent paper that tried to mathematically construct and critically assess the theory of Geometric Unity as laid out in Eric's content.

Eric has not exactly welcomed the critical feedback and has accused Tim and his co-author, Theo, of having nefarious motives and being very bad guys. So we thought it was worth talking to Tim about their real motivations for the paper, their criticisms of Geometric Unity, and whether they are official DISC agents.

Join us as we leap one more time into Weinstein world!

Notes provided by Tim

  1. Response to Geometric Unity paper by Timothy Nguyen and Theo Polya and corresponding blog post. The paper provides 25 clickable timestamps to Weinstein video segments to let the reader confirm directly the veracity the criticisms. 
  2. Clubhouse recording with Eric evading questions about Geometric Unity and implying his critics are bad actors.
  3. Technical notes on Weinstein’s limited responses: 1) Weinstein confesses on Joe Rogan Episode #1628 that “one of the criticisms is valid but is something that I would have brought up anyways” (see time near 73:30). Correspondingly, in Section 8.2 of Weinstein’s Geometric Unity, he admits that “unfortunately, the author is no longer conversant … and has been unable to locate the notes from decades ago that originally picked out the [Shiab] operator”. The inability to construct the Shiab operator remains a fundamental objection to Geometric Unity. 2) Weinstein says here, the authors misunderstand GU as being chiral. But the objection is that the theory has a chiral anomaly, which is not contingent on the theory being chiral. 3) Weinstein suggests here (and on Joe Rogan) that there is incorrect inference that he is using supersymmetry in 14 dimensions. The interview referenced in the response paper suggests otherwise, where he explicitly mentions supersymmetry.
  4. The “sign flip” discussion Nguyen used to deduce that Weinstein does not understand the Seiberg-Witten equations concerns the issue of obtaining a crucial bound on the spinor field (as discussed in the Wikipedia article) needed to obtain compactness. Having the wrong sign makes the entire theory ill-behaved.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guoors. It's the podcast where an

0:19.5

anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our very best to understand what they're talking about.

0:27.0

I'm Professor Matt Browner with me is Dr. Chris Kavanaugh.

0:31.0

G'd a day, Chris, how you're doing today?

0:33.0

Watch it, top of the morning, to you, ma'am.

0:37.0

So this is another special interview episode, I believe,

0:41.0

and would you like to introduce our guest? I will and I'll just

0:44.6

mention that it's on the topic we rarely discuss these people called the

0:49.0

Weinstein's or I'm not sure yeah you people probably aren't familiar with them, but they're big figures online but we we don't have one of them here

0:58.1

However, we have the next best thing Tim Tim Nure.

1:02.7

So Tim is currently an engineer at Google,

1:07.4

but previously mathematics PhD from MIT.

1:12.4

And relevant for us he is the co-offer with Theo Polia who we'll discuss

1:19.7

later on a response to geometric unity and this was a paper constructed from Eric's publicly available material where he described his theory of everything

1:33.0

prior to his recent release of the paper.

1:36.0

I mean, we can get into how the paper came about

1:39.0

and the response to it and so on,

1:40.3

but hello Tim and thanks for joining. Yeah great to be here I guess a little bit about me so I got my

1:47.6

PhD in mathematics at MIT in 2011 and it was engaged theory so basically the same subject that Eric studied at Harvard and

1:56.2

significantly with the same sorts of lineage because lineage sort of matters a lot in academia

2:01.8

so the same style the same sort of conceptual framework.

2:05.2

Did two academic postdocs, one at the Simon Center

...

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