Eric Weinstein

Weinstein left academia after "stints" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[11] More than twenty years later, in 2013, he announced a potential unified theory of physics. Particle physicist David E. Kaplan remarked, "There are many people who come from the outside with crazy theories, but they are not serious. Eric is serious."[11] At the invitation of mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, Weinstein described the theory at a colloquium, Geometric Unity, in May 2013 at the University of Oxford's Clarendon Laboratory.[12][13] The unpublished theory includes a 14-dimensional "observerse" and predictions for more than 150 new subatomic particles, some of which Weinstein believes could account for dark matter.

Few physicists attended the lecture, in part due to errors in the dissemination of its announcement, so Weinstein repeated the lecture later that month.[14] No preprint, paper, or equations were published.[15] Most physicists expressed skepticism about the theory.[16][14] Joseph Conlon of Oxford stated that some of the predicted particles would already have been detected in existing accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider.[16] Science writer Jennifer Ouellette criticized the colloquium in a blog for Scientific American, arguing that the ideas could not be properly vetted by experts because there was no published paper.[17] Mathematician Edward Frenkel stated, "I think that both mathematicians and physicists should take Eric's ideas very seriously. Even independently of their physical implications, I believe that Eric's insights will be useful to mathematicians, because he points to some structures which have not been studied before, as far as I know."[11]