Saturday, October 4, 2025

The big picture

Let's review the big picture... There are three bodies of formal work from Eric Weinstein that interest me: 

(1) his physical theory of everything, Geometric Unity, including the principles that motivate its form 

(2) a potential mathematical framework that includes variations on GU physical theory, and should include a gravitational derivation of the Seiberg-Witten equations

(3) coauthored with his wife Pia Malaney, a gauge-theoretic approach to economics. 

I also have some interest in his sociology of knowledge (DISC versus IDW), how his views compare to those of Peter Thiel, and so forth. But my main focus is on the formal work, and especially on the physics. 

The major source of information on GU is a 2021 draft paper. The 2013 Oxford lecture and its 2020 addendum also provide some context. The 2025 UCSD seminar on dark energy contains glimpses of how theory has evolved since 2021, and another scrap of information (about the fermionic sector) was recently revealed, in a public discussion between Eric and Elon Musk's "Grok" AI. 

The public discussion of the theory has been formal, in the sense that it focuses on motivating and constructing equations for the theory, but not on solutions to those equations. As models of what solutions might look like, I suggest the work in Eric's Harvard dissertation; the Seiberg-Witten moduli space but with the SU(2) gauge field interpreted as a gravitational connection; and the "BRSTQFTs" constructed in a 1997 paper by Baulieu et al, which build on Eric's dissertation. These are also potentially all part of the mathematical framework mentioned above. 

(Incidentally, in spaces online where the theory is discussed, I have run across efforts to reformulate the theory in terms of "derived geometry", which would be a significant broadening of the GU mathematical framework.) 

As a new starting point, I have suggested construction of cosmological vacuum solutions to the bosonic part of classical GU. The inclusion of fermions may require creative resolution of issues surrounding the quantum theory. 

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