Brouhaha Brewing—Part 1

Physicists in recent years have been confronted with a number of intractable problems that just keep mocking their attempts to resolve them. Some of the brightest researchers (count Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking among them) have unsuccessfully banged their heads against a brick wall of seemingly insoluble problems for much of their careers.

Here are a few examples: Why can't scientists get Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics to agree? What the hell is all the mysterious “dark matter” and “dark energy” that constitutes some 96% of the universe, and why can't we find it? Why can't a single unified theory describing and relating all the fundamental forces of the universe be found? How can the confusing soup of fundamental particles be sorted out and finalized? Why is it that string theory—which appears to be an elegant “theory of everything”—started out so promising a few decades ago, but has gotten bogged down in the last few years, such that all attempts to resolve it have either led to a dead end or even more puzzling mysteries? What is the nature of the bizarre mechanism that causes “quantum entanglement,” in which information seems to travel faster than light—in fact, instantaneously? (That last one really bugged Einstein.)

Now comes a mathematician who claims to have solved all these quandaries (and more) by taking a completely new approach. His theory, which he's dubbed “Geometric Unity,” is a work that he's devoted his last 20 years to developing. This remarkable announcement has been issued by one Eric Weinstein. He has a PhD in mathematical physics, but dropped out of academia 20 years ago to pursue his dream as a lone wolf.

It's both a startling and a romantic story: an unknown genius toiling away for two decades in the shadows, eclipsing what legions of physicists and mathematicians have failed to do for a couple of generations. Weinstein was invited this past May to give a lecture at Oxford University, to describe his theory and its implications. He says there is no missing dark matter in his calculations; it's all present and accounted for. His model is apparently straightforward and elegant, and it makes many new predictions about particle physics.

This is an amazing development—one fit for sensational press headlines; and it's gotten a few, though the topic is a bit too complicated for your typical tabloid sound bite shrieks. Has Dr. Weinstein truly made the work of countless scientists futile? Some non-scientists may jump on this announcement and get carried away with its implications, but let's hold on a minute here.

This situation is reminiscent of the sensational news a year or so ago, that Italian experimentalists had measured neutrinos exceeding the speed of light. Gracious! Einstein was wrong! The speed of light is not an absolute limit, after all! What furious sound-bite reporting zinged around the world's cyber lanes at the time! A few months later, however, further investigation showed that they had made an experimental error. So Einstein was right after all! I doubt that even one of all those newspapers and TV “news” shows—those that had earlier trumpeted the amazing “discovery”—even noticed the retraction. If they did, they'd certainly not regard it as news worthy.

More on the brouhaha next time...