Will the NNSA go for the “low hanging fruit” and select a Triad National Security 2.0 to manage LLNL in 2026? This is essentially what the NNSA did in 2006 and 2007 with LANS and LLNS respectively, when these for-profit LLCs were selected to managed these two Labs.
Comments
I hope so, but my guess is Bechtel will need the money so I would get LLNLs stays in.
Eric Weinstein is entertaining but he is not and never has been a scientist. He has a single published paper as a graduate student with very few citations. He published nothing as a postdoc and left academics after that as is super bitter about that. He had some idea about a theory of everything which is considered utterly crackpot by everyone and shown to have made up mathematics. This idea as never published and he is not willing to debate or even discuss it with a serious scientist. If you want to go the the YouTube route then just look at the following links. The math is wrong wrong or made up. It is classic crackpot stuff. You cannot find a single physicists that takes his stuff seriously. He never shows and actually explains anything just vague words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd-0COLM8oc
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j86WIfRfPDk
There is endless works posting out he is a crackpot
https://www.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/159nr7y/eric_weinstein_is_a_physics_crackpot/
"There's a pretty good exchange between Sean Caroll and Tim Nguyen along these lines. Sean is too polite to call Weinstein a "crackpot," but he explains why he doesn't pay Eric's work any mind. Peter Woit makes similar remarks about Weinstein in his interview with Lex Fridman, actually, though he's more understated.
"In a way I think it's quite impressive, really, how much mind share Eric has managed to absorb in this area despite a total lack of substance (according to other physicists, anyway). I imagine that on some level Woit must have wondered why Lex would even ask him about Weinstein to begin with."
He also claimed to have revolutionized economics, by introducing "Gauge Theory ideas" this makes no sense at all and is just throwing words together. Once again this was shown to be crackpot nonsense that no one talked seriously. He gave a talk at Chicago here is what they said about it.
"What happened at the seminar? I saw the live tweets but what’s the consensus? Who “won”?
From another thread: To be fair he sounded more like an elaborate prank. He had zero capacity to show or explain anything. Absolute zero. An undergrad could have done a better job. He couldn't even show a final result or equation that people could look at to compare with prior work to say whether it could improve anything or not. It was almost like they went to Hollywood and picked up a failed actor and asked him to pretend to be this guy and do the presentation. There are certain levels of hilariously bad and he hit all of them. It felt more like a comedy than academic."
Now besides that the stuff he says in the posted interview about science is beyond wrong about physics, science and everything else. I will not go into detail. It boils down to him saying "String has not been shown to be correct...therefore all of physics and science is in trouble". Now with that alone it is clear why it is wrong...hint string theory is not all of physics or science it never has been. The argument is just wacky.
In short the guy is a entertaining grifter it just kind of made up crap. His brother Brett is kind of the same way.
2/27/2024 6:03 AM
Interesting, but not remotely related to the “Who will it be in 2026” post.