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Comment by ryan93 | Hacker News Reader

There is zero chance his theory has any merit. Why are some people so susceptible to this stuff?

>There is zero chance his theory has any merit.

That seems a bit harsh. There is a certain beauty in the geometry equations Weinstein presented. I find it interesting that EFE, Yang-Mills and Dirac emerge from that. He certainly hasn't shown a complete theory of everything but I wouldn't say that it doesn't have any merit.

If I had one criticism of Weinstein it would be that he's never put anything down on paper for anyone to deeply review.

Weinstein is a grifter, he doesn’t want to or can’t actually do hard work so he does podcasts and tweets and whines about how badly he has been treated. People find this compelling I guess.

Calling someone a 'grifter' is an intellectually lazy derogatory epithet. How is he grifting?

He appears to have been trying for many years to convince people that he's discovered a unified theory of physics, without producing a single technical paper on the topic. I think that suffices.

grifting implies he's doing it for financial gain. I think there's more lucrative ways for him to make money than publishing physics papers.

I'd say benefit generally instead of gain that must be precisely in monetary terms. Grifting is lying plus purpose, and that purpose may be any kind of advantage obtained by smoke-and-mirror tactics. It may be reputation, or satisfaction from being talked about, appearing in talk radio, that kind of stuff.

It seems like a certain percentage of people are susceptible to Weinstein type claims. Like people with anti vaccine stuff or natural remedies.

Well, that latter one kind of seals the deal for me. Falsifiability is essential to me.

The problem is that laymen don’t have the requisite physics understanding to be able to tell the difference between actual rigorous theory and crank theory that sounds fancy.

(In this particular case I don’t know the requisite theory myself but having experienced crank theories in areas of physics that I understand, it’s obvious this is the same.)

Zero chance? Would you bet the future of humanity on that? The cost is some brain cycles of a few other people.

If he was just a random researcher (and was actually putting it down in a falsifiable form), fine, but he’s a public figure. Half a million followers, many of which now think they have THE unified theory and are going to waste the time of actual physicists.

And Don’t forget Brandolini’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

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