A correction has been added to this article regarding the advertising of Eric Weinstein’s talk – please see below for details.

Exciting news: all the problems plaguing physics have been solved. Dark matter, dark energy, quantum gravity – one amazing insight has delivered us from decades of struggle to a new knowledge nirvana.

There’s a catch, however: I’m unable to tell you what that insight is. Neither I, nor any of my professional physicist friends, have the faintest clue. In fact, nobody except Eric Weinstein and mathematician Marcus du Sautoy are sufficiently familiar with the claims to venture an opinion.

Until yesterday Weinstein was largely unknown to us. He has a PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard University, but left academia years ago and now makes his living as an economist and consultant at a New York hedge fund.

That is not to say he doesn’t have anything to contribute, but he will have to go through the proper channels. Physicists are inherently conservative. New claims, especially bold ones, face stiff resistance. That’s for a good reason: faster-than-light neutrinos, anyone?

Don’t tell the physicists

Yesterday Weinstein, encouraged by du Sautoy, went public with a loud splash and in a in the main physics lecture theatre here at the University of Oxford. “I’m trying to promote, perhaps, a new way of doing science. Let’s start with really big ideas, let’s be brave and let’s have a discussion,” du Sautoy told The Guardian.

Sounds fair enough, until you discover that no one thought to invite any of Oxford’s, er, physicists (see correction below).

While Weinstein was delivering his lecture, the theoretical physicists were in a different room listening to a different speaker discuss a different topic (a new source of CP violation in charm physics and its implication for the unitarity triangle, if you’re curious). Only afterwards did anyone spot news of the revelatory talk that had taken place next door.

Hosting a lecture in a university physics department without inviting any physicists is, at best, an unforgivable oversight. As my colleague put it, “It’s surprising that the organisers did not invite the particle physicists to attend – if indeed the intention was to have a discussion.”

A discussion? Even if we’d been invited, that would have been hard without prior disclosure of the nitty-gritty mathematical details. Grand claims like Weinstein’s would – in the normal course of science – be accompanied by a technical paper explaining their foundations. We could then take a deep breath and puzzle over whether they’re consistent with the vast knowledge of nature arising from centuries of experiment and observation.

At what point during this long and difficult process does it become legitimate to proclaim a breakthrough? It’s a line in shifting sands, but that line has certainly been crossed. Du Sautoy – the University of Oxford’s professor of the public understanding of science, no less – has short-circuited science’s basic checks and balances. Yesterday’s shenanigans were anything but scientific.

Read Marcus du Sautoy’s letter in response to this article: “Geometric unity“