Invisible college

Two months ago, I mentioned that I had just been a guest on a GU-themed Youtube livestream. That channel is offline at the moment, but while it existed, it attracted quite a few people interested in GU, including some with mathematical knowledge. Notably, one pseudonymous commenter posted a reformulation of GU in terms of some higher-math concepts (derived geometry, shifted symplectic structures) that are also employed in the well-known "Geometric Langlands" research program. 

It is therefore interesting to see Langlands theorist Ed Frenkel stirring up physics twitter by praising his friend Eric's theory. Was that him lurking among the Youtube rabble? Probably not, lots of people know Langlands. In any case, he and Eric just spent a week going over GU together. We shall see if anything new comes of it. 

In related news, Eric had a public conversation with Elon's AI, Grok, about gauge-theoretic economics, which like Frenkel's declaration, attracted hostile attention from those who took for granted that Eric's theories were already refuted and buried. 

A while back, Eric said that, while SpaceX is the part of Elon's empire that is working on interplanetary travel, xAI is the part that is working on interstellar travel, because it's allowing fair discussion of GU to occur, despite the academic disinterest. I admire the creative chutzpah by means of which Eric thereby assimilated one of Elon's central ventures to his own agenda! 

I suppose I did something similar when I suggested that general relativity, string theory, loop quantum gravity, and geometric unity together form a natural quartet (metric-based and connection-based, theories of gravity and theories of everything). As he says in the conversation with Grok linked above, he has done "important work that has never been fairly digested by the fields in which it occurs", and that's my model of the proper context in which GU should be assessed.