This strikes me as way, way, way too much hand-wavey "they", and not enough hard fact.
I find it highly improbable that "they" have managed to divert physics for decades. The human thirst for knowledge is way too powerful. There are universities all over the world. How could the U.S. government have sent the entire field of physics down a fruitless rabbithole without anybody noticing?
And the likeliest reason that "they" haven't paid attention to Weinstein's GU theory, is that most everybody who has claimed to have a GU theory for decades is a crank and a crackpot. I don't know about Eric Weinstein, but his brother lost the plot years ago, and they both seem to have a penchant for gnostic prognostications.
Just my immediate reaction. This whole post feels off to me. Too much "pattern recognition" not enough data.
Sorry, a bit blunt. Usually love your stuff. Not so sure about this conspiratorial angle.
The more you look into this, the more the pieces start to line up.
Physics HAS been dead-ended, and EW has been talking about it for years now.
Andreessen and Horowitz really had that meeting, and they claim this is what they were told.
The 1917 Espionage Act and the 1946 and 54 Nuclear Secrets legislation actually does make doing unsanctioned nuclear physics a crime. It’s technically a capital offense.
“Born Secret” is real. There’s case law and precedent:
“Lessons for how the AEA might govern foundation models are found in the only courtroom test of the AEA's restricted data provisions: U.S. v Progressive, Inc. That case starts in 1979, when writer Howard Morland interviewed various scientists and Department of Energy employees. Using his publicly collected data, he wrote an article for the magazine The Progressive that explained how to build a hydrogen bomb. Though the information he collected was available in a public domain, he synthesized it in such a way that it revealed a nuclear physics breakthrough not widely known at the time. This synthesis is much like how foundation models, trained on petabytes of unclassified data, might generate nuclear secrets.
Could Morland have been at fault? The Department of Energy sued under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954's restricted data doctrine to stop the magazine from publishing Morland's article. The government argued that although the nuclear science information The Progressive wanted to publish was available in the public domain, "the danger lies in the exposition of certain concepts never heretofore disclosed in conjunction with one another.” The Court, with some apprehension, granted the government's preliminary injunction against the article's publication, judging that the "publication of the technical information on the hydrogen bomb contained in the article is analogous to publication of troop movements or locations in time of war and falls within the extremely narrow exception to the rule against prior restraint."
Going further, the born secret doctrine means that even if someone independently derives nuclear weapons design information without access to any classified sources, that information is still legally considered restricted data and subject to the AEA's prohibitions on communication. This is demonstrated in U.S. v. Progressive, where the government successfully argued that even synthesized public information could be "born secret" if it revealed previously undisclosed nuclear weapons concepts in combination.”
Something similar happened with John Aristotle Phillips at Princeton:
“Famously, John Aristotle Phillips, an undergraduate at Princeton, demonstrated the ease of designing a nuclear weapon on paper based solely on public information in 1976. The government classified his work and made it illegal to distribute under the AEA. Phillips famously noted that:
Suppose an average—or below-average in my case—physics student at a university could design a workable atomic bomb on paper. That would prove the point dramatically and show the federal government that stronger safeguards have to be placed on the manufacturing and use of plutonium. In short, if I could design a bomb, almost any intelligent person could.”
"The 1917 Espionage Act and the 1946 and 54 Nuclear Secrets legislation actually does make doing unsanctioned nuclear physics a crime."
I think this may miss the difference between theory and application. The Standard Model of physics (theory) is fairly well validated, is not classified, and is more than sufficient, as theory, to build a hydrogen bomb (application). But there are certain necessary 'equations of state' that in principle could be derived from the SM, but in practice must be derived experimentally. Even if you had these, you would also have to be brilliant to design the bomb.
So it does not follow that no one can discover the true laws of physics, because they would be too dangerous. That *might* be the case, if the leap from beyond-state-of-the-art physics to a catastrophic weapon is simple. But if it is not simple with nuclear physics, it is not a given that it is simple with anything else.
Well, as Horowitz and Phillips both demonstrated, you don't have to be a physicist to figure out how to build a nuclear weapon. You just have to be smart enough to know how to put the pieces together.
In his appearance on the Diary of a CEO podcast last summer, Weinstein hit this same point (about the curtailed freedom of physicists) when he said:
"Go watch the movie Oppenheimer, if you will. But this is why physicists are the only occupation in the country that doesn’t have full free speech.
[...]
My point is, I don’t think our government knows the real secrets of physics. If I had to make a bet tomorrow, I don’t think there’s a secret government office that knows physics.
I think there were a bunch of very smart people who understood how dangerous physics was, and the idea that we would continue to do it in public struck them as insane, because it could lead to destruction. When I tell you that the most dangerous idea in human history is maybe there’s a neutral version of the proton, that’s supposed to sound insane. But the entire chain of ideas results in nuclear fusion happening on Earth at the direction of the President of the United States.
And that’s what I’m trying to get at, which people don’t understand: you probably don’t even realize that the Department of Energy is really the Department of Physics, because we pretend that it’s the Department of Energy. It’s like how we had a War Department that became the Department of Defense. We’re scared of the possibility of physics. We don’t even want to talk about it.
Literally no other occupation has lost free speech like physics. There’s a special doctrine called “restricted data” that says you cannot write physics on a napkin, even if you have nothing to do with the government—I think even if you’re not an American—if it has anything that could possibly have to do with nuclear weapons.
In other words, any advance that might have something to do with nuclear weapons—you have to recognize that the instant you put pen to paper, or you start talking to somebody, you’re committing a violation of the 1917 Espionage Act.
And if you think that’s crazy, start exploring the terms “restricted data,” the 1917 Espionage Act, the 1946 and 1954 Atomic Energy Acts, and the doctrine of “born secret.”
It is illegal to pursue Q-clearance data if you don’t have a Q clearance. But if you’re creating Q-clearance data out of your own head as a byproduct of trying to do physics, you are actually potentially committing a capital offense."
***
To your last point, I'm not saying that "no one can discover the true laws of physics" because I believe it's been done.
According to my hypothesis here, I'm saying they DID discover the true laws of physics, they decided that the nuclear weapons-related physics was too dangerous and classified it, they claim (per Andreessen) to have classified entire branches of physics (plural) and are willing to do so again, and this acts as a natural retardant to keep people from reaching the same conclusions that have already been reached. As with Phillips and Horowitz, when someone does figure it out independently, they either legally silence them or they classify their work product.
If String Theory is a side road going nowhere in particular, there is a main road, it seems to me, where downstream of the kind of work that was being done at the Manhattan Project likely led to other discoveries that would have challenged General Relativity and likely the Standard Model as well. Weinstein has said that "Einstein is our jailer" and "we have to defeat him" or we'll never learn interstellar travel.
I'm not educated in physics, so I can only nibble at the edges here based on what I can glean from a layman's POV. But I've heard EW talk about his grand unifying theory -- Geometric Unity -- as something he was hesitant to talk too much about because he feared he would wind up like Einstein if he was right, and potentially unleash unintended catastrophic forces on the very human race his theory was intended to try to preserve by making them multiplanetary. He has since said he decided it's worth the risk because he's afraid we're going to destroy ourselves regardless and we need a better plan than chemical rockets to spready humanity among the stars, but (arguably for the same reason physics itself has been shanghaied) he can't seem to get many physicists to engage with his work and as he said in the episode above, none of the people who funded his education have any interest in his theory -- but Epstein did, and somehow knew all about it even though EW kept the project pretty secret.
I find EW pretty interesting, but even he is speculating about most of this.
I can understand why the government doesn't want the proliferation of atomic bombs, and thus why they would clamp down so hard on the subject. And maybe that led them to pushing String Theory to divert all the physicists down a rabbit hole that goes nowhere, but it could equally as well have happened because physicists led themselves down that hole - and they're smart enough to convince the government that they were on to something. I mean, how do they get funding for any BIG project? They talk as if spending all that money will lead to incredible discoveries. But in theoretical physics, who can say for sure what will end up being discovered?
Regardless, once they started to get funding, then of course all the other physicists wanted to get in on the action. After all, these are the top people in their field going this way. Surely they must be on to something. It doesn't have to be controlled by some secretive people somewhere. It could have simply been done in arrogance.
I remember reading in one of Diane Pasulka's books about how she put on a small conference with a number of these scientists involved in studying UAP artifacts. At one point one of them started to say something he apparently shouldn't and the others had to tell him to stop. It was comical. There was no government monitors there. Just engineers and scientists who are used to talking about all this stuff, but then almost too easily slipping up. It struck me that there really is no hard control on this information. It's just scientists doing their work and not wanting to blow their jobs by screwing up.
EW's point that this is all a zombie project is probably more closer to the truth. Whoever in the past was really in charge and setting the agenda is now long gone, and this stuff mostly drifts on by its own inertia. It's all classified so people don't talk. And when they do, it's easy enough to do psyops and discredit them. But even the people doing the pysops are out of the loop. It's all compartmentalized, so maybe nobody is really in the "loop".
AI is a different. They may want to control it like they did with nuclear secrets, but they will have a very hard time. There are now millions of AI models you can download for free. Many of those models have been downloaded millions of times. LOTS of people have their hands on them and they just run them on their personal machines. They are slower and not as powerful, but it doesn't matter. You can still do a lot with them - that no one else sees what you are doing. Open source projects are helping to make those models more powerful, so basically the genie is out of the bottle.
People say AI will hit a wall, but I'm not seeing it at all. They are making major advances at multiple levels much faster than any previous tech wave. And over the next year (or maybe two), AI will go from contributing to its development to fully taking it over. If there is any wall, the AI will figure a way around it. And AI will figure a way around the government censors.
I don't know much about Epstein, but he was connected to very rich and powerful people. Those people usually know things normal people like us don't know. If they thought EW had potential with his theories, then presumably they wanted to know more about it. It could be as straightforward as that.
You have to ask yourself, who exactly are the top physicists who know these supposed secrets? It's like Indiana Jones. The government guy says we have "top" people working on it. Indi keeps asking "who", because he knows every one and any one who could possible do a decent job. But of course, there are no "top" people. The arc was put in a box and stuck in a warehouse. EW is like Indi. He knows all the top people. So who is it that is doing these things? It's more reasonable to think that it's nobody.
This strikes me as way, way, way too much hand-wavey "they", and not enough hard fact.
I find it highly improbable that "they" have managed to divert physics for decades. The human thirst for knowledge is way too powerful. There are universities all over the world. How could the U.S. government have sent the entire field of physics down a fruitless rabbithole without anybody noticing?
And the likeliest reason that "they" haven't paid attention to Weinstein's GU theory, is that most everybody who has claimed to have a GU theory for decades is a crank and a crackpot. I don't know about Eric Weinstein, but his brother lost the plot years ago, and they both seem to have a penchant for gnostic prognostications.
Just my immediate reaction. This whole post feels off to me. Too much "pattern recognition" not enough data.
Sorry, a bit blunt. Usually love your stuff. Not so sure about this conspiratorial angle.
The more you look into this, the more the pieces start to line up.
Physics HAS been dead-ended, and EW has been talking about it for years now.
Andreessen and Horowitz really had that meeting, and they claim this is what they were told.
The 1917 Espionage Act and the 1946 and 54 Nuclear Secrets legislation actually does make doing unsanctioned nuclear physics a crime. It’s technically a capital offense.
“Born Secret” is real. There’s case law and precedent:
“Lessons for how the AEA might govern foundation models are found in the only courtroom test of the AEA's restricted data provisions: U.S. v Progressive, Inc. That case starts in 1979, when writer Howard Morland interviewed various scientists and Department of Energy employees. Using his publicly collected data, he wrote an article for the magazine The Progressive that explained how to build a hydrogen bomb. Though the information he collected was available in a public domain, he synthesized it in such a way that it revealed a nuclear physics breakthrough not widely known at the time. This synthesis is much like how foundation models, trained on petabytes of unclassified data, might generate nuclear secrets.
Could Morland have been at fault? The Department of Energy sued under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954's restricted data doctrine to stop the magazine from publishing Morland's article. The government argued that although the nuclear science information The Progressive wanted to publish was available in the public domain, "the danger lies in the exposition of certain concepts never heretofore disclosed in conjunction with one another.” The Court, with some apprehension, granted the government's preliminary injunction against the article's publication, judging that the "publication of the technical information on the hydrogen bomb contained in the article is analogous to publication of troop movements or locations in time of war and falls within the extremely narrow exception to the rule against prior restraint."
Going further, the born secret doctrine means that even if someone independently derives nuclear weapons design information without access to any classified sources, that information is still legally considered restricted data and subject to the AEA's prohibitions on communication. This is demonstrated in U.S. v. Progressive, where the government successfully argued that even synthesized public information could be "born secret" if it revealed previously undisclosed nuclear weapons concepts in combination.”
Something similar happened with John Aristotle Phillips at Princeton:
“Famously, John Aristotle Phillips, an undergraduate at Princeton, demonstrated the ease of designing a nuclear weapon on paper based solely on public information in 1976. The government classified his work and made it illegal to distribute under the AEA. Phillips famously noted that:
Suppose an average—or below-average in my case—physics student at a university could design a workable atomic bomb on paper. That would prove the point dramatically and show the federal government that stronger safeguards have to be placed on the manufacturing and use of plutonium. In short, if I could design a bomb, almost any intelligent person could.”
Both of these taken from: https://www.ailawpolicy.com/p/ai-born-secret-the-atomic-energy
BTW, Eric and Bret are very different. I don’t follow Bret. I’ve tried and I can’t do it. I find Eric to be a riveting thinker on most things.
"The 1917 Espionage Act and the 1946 and 54 Nuclear Secrets legislation actually does make doing unsanctioned nuclear physics a crime."
I think this may miss the difference between theory and application. The Standard Model of physics (theory) is fairly well validated, is not classified, and is more than sufficient, as theory, to build a hydrogen bomb (application). But there are certain necessary 'equations of state' that in principle could be derived from the SM, but in practice must be derived experimentally. Even if you had these, you would also have to be brilliant to design the bomb.
So it does not follow that no one can discover the true laws of physics, because they would be too dangerous. That *might* be the case, if the leap from beyond-state-of-the-art physics to a catastrophic weapon is simple. But if it is not simple with nuclear physics, it is not a given that it is simple with anything else.
Well, as Horowitz and Phillips both demonstrated, you don't have to be a physicist to figure out how to build a nuclear weapon. You just have to be smart enough to know how to put the pieces together.
In his appearance on the Diary of a CEO podcast last summer, Weinstein hit this same point (about the curtailed freedom of physicists) when he said:
"Go watch the movie Oppenheimer, if you will. But this is why physicists are the only occupation in the country that doesn’t have full free speech.
[...]
My point is, I don’t think our government knows the real secrets of physics. If I had to make a bet tomorrow, I don’t think there’s a secret government office that knows physics.
I think there were a bunch of very smart people who understood how dangerous physics was, and the idea that we would continue to do it in public struck them as insane, because it could lead to destruction. When I tell you that the most dangerous idea in human history is maybe there’s a neutral version of the proton, that’s supposed to sound insane. But the entire chain of ideas results in nuclear fusion happening on Earth at the direction of the President of the United States.
And that’s what I’m trying to get at, which people don’t understand: you probably don’t even realize that the Department of Energy is really the Department of Physics, because we pretend that it’s the Department of Energy. It’s like how we had a War Department that became the Department of Defense. We’re scared of the possibility of physics. We don’t even want to talk about it.
Literally no other occupation has lost free speech like physics. There’s a special doctrine called “restricted data” that says you cannot write physics on a napkin, even if you have nothing to do with the government—I think even if you’re not an American—if it has anything that could possibly have to do with nuclear weapons.
In other words, any advance that might have something to do with nuclear weapons—you have to recognize that the instant you put pen to paper, or you start talking to somebody, you’re committing a violation of the 1917 Espionage Act.
And if you think that’s crazy, start exploring the terms “restricted data,” the 1917 Espionage Act, the 1946 and 1954 Atomic Energy Acts, and the doctrine of “born secret.”
It is illegal to pursue Q-clearance data if you don’t have a Q clearance. But if you’re creating Q-clearance data out of your own head as a byproduct of trying to do physics, you are actually potentially committing a capital offense."
***
To your last point, I'm not saying that "no one can discover the true laws of physics" because I believe it's been done.
According to my hypothesis here, I'm saying they DID discover the true laws of physics, they decided that the nuclear weapons-related physics was too dangerous and classified it, they claim (per Andreessen) to have classified entire branches of physics (plural) and are willing to do so again, and this acts as a natural retardant to keep people from reaching the same conclusions that have already been reached. As with Phillips and Horowitz, when someone does figure it out independently, they either legally silence them or they classify their work product.
If String Theory is a side road going nowhere in particular, there is a main road, it seems to me, where downstream of the kind of work that was being done at the Manhattan Project likely led to other discoveries that would have challenged General Relativity and likely the Standard Model as well. Weinstein has said that "Einstein is our jailer" and "we have to defeat him" or we'll never learn interstellar travel.
I'm not educated in physics, so I can only nibble at the edges here based on what I can glean from a layman's POV. But I've heard EW talk about his grand unifying theory -- Geometric Unity -- as something he was hesitant to talk too much about because he feared he would wind up like Einstein if he was right, and potentially unleash unintended catastrophic forces on the very human race his theory was intended to try to preserve by making them multiplanetary. He has since said he decided it's worth the risk because he's afraid we're going to destroy ourselves regardless and we need a better plan than chemical rockets to spready humanity among the stars, but (arguably for the same reason physics itself has been shanghaied) he can't seem to get many physicists to engage with his work and as he said in the episode above, none of the people who funded his education have any interest in his theory -- but Epstein did, and somehow knew all about it even though EW kept the project pretty secret.
I find EW pretty interesting, but even he is speculating about most of this.
I can understand why the government doesn't want the proliferation of atomic bombs, and thus why they would clamp down so hard on the subject. And maybe that led them to pushing String Theory to divert all the physicists down a rabbit hole that goes nowhere, but it could equally as well have happened because physicists led themselves down that hole - and they're smart enough to convince the government that they were on to something. I mean, how do they get funding for any BIG project? They talk as if spending all that money will lead to incredible discoveries. But in theoretical physics, who can say for sure what will end up being discovered?
Regardless, once they started to get funding, then of course all the other physicists wanted to get in on the action. After all, these are the top people in their field going this way. Surely they must be on to something. It doesn't have to be controlled by some secretive people somewhere. It could have simply been done in arrogance.
I remember reading in one of Diane Pasulka's books about how she put on a small conference with a number of these scientists involved in studying UAP artifacts. At one point one of them started to say something he apparently shouldn't and the others had to tell him to stop. It was comical. There was no government monitors there. Just engineers and scientists who are used to talking about all this stuff, but then almost too easily slipping up. It struck me that there really is no hard control on this information. It's just scientists doing their work and not wanting to blow their jobs by screwing up.
EW's point that this is all a zombie project is probably more closer to the truth. Whoever in the past was really in charge and setting the agenda is now long gone, and this stuff mostly drifts on by its own inertia. It's all classified so people don't talk. And when they do, it's easy enough to do psyops and discredit them. But even the people doing the pysops are out of the loop. It's all compartmentalized, so maybe nobody is really in the "loop".
AI is a different. They may want to control it like they did with nuclear secrets, but they will have a very hard time. There are now millions of AI models you can download for free. Many of those models have been downloaded millions of times. LOTS of people have their hands on them and they just run them on their personal machines. They are slower and not as powerful, but it doesn't matter. You can still do a lot with them - that no one else sees what you are doing. Open source projects are helping to make those models more powerful, so basically the genie is out of the bottle.
People say AI will hit a wall, but I'm not seeing it at all. They are making major advances at multiple levels much faster than any previous tech wave. And over the next year (or maybe two), AI will go from contributing to its development to fully taking it over. If there is any wall, the AI will figure a way around it. And AI will figure a way around the government censors.
I don't know much about Epstein, but he was connected to very rich and powerful people. Those people usually know things normal people like us don't know. If they thought EW had potential with his theories, then presumably they wanted to know more about it. It could be as straightforward as that.
You have to ask yourself, who exactly are the top physicists who know these supposed secrets? It's like Indiana Jones. The government guy says we have "top" people working on it. Indi keeps asking "who", because he knows every one and any one who could possible do a decent job. But of course, there are no "top" people. The arc was put in a box and stuck in a warehouse. EW is like Indi. He knows all the top people. So who is it that is doing these things? It's more reasonable to think that it's nobody.