What Sean said is, I, Sean Carroll, am not that interested in labeling things as pseudoscience. No, Sean. How dare you cast shade and aspersions of the kind that I wouldn't seek to cast on you, but I will now.

After the noise died down, I sat down with Eric for a conversation about all of this. His theory of geometric unity. What does it all mean? And why do so many people misunderstand or misrepresent what it's all about? How can we test it in the lab and in space? And will geometric unity kill off string theory once and for all? Eric Weinstein, welcome back to the into the Impossible podcast. Live and in person. Well, not live, but we're in person. Good to see you.

Oh, we're live.

We are alive.

There we go.

It's been about two years since you were in that very seat. Podcast seating has changed a little bit. Coming off a one hour plus seminar with you speaking about geometric unity to a wrapped audience of string theorists, cosmologists, particle physicists, and fresh men and women. What did you think of it?

Like ucsd. Excuse me, crowd.

When you heard about the DESI results, the cognizante called it desi. We never, we never read out the acronym. We always say the acronym as if it's.

Well, I have to be careful because I'm married to an Indian woman and the word for country in Hindi is desh. And so they refer to themselves as desi.

When you heard about this news, I mean, obviously this is not something you post, dicted, retrodicted and put in just before our talk. Right? So this must been something that.

From the 1980s, right?

So this must have been something that you've been thinking about for quite some time. So how, how did you react when you heard the news? Now, we should say in that seat last week was the spokesperson, former spokesperson, desi, still leader of the project, Kyle Hansen, the University of Utah, the running utes or the Uding ute. Something like that. Anyway, and he told me, well, look, this is a tantalizing hint, but so was dark energy when it was first kind of encountered. So we should not, you know, immediately jump to conclusions. A cosmological constant is dead and. And so forth. But what was your, as a human, as a man, Eric, what was your reaction?

Look, I don't think that it. The results could fall apart. You could have systemic error and I wouldn't change my tune. Einstein was already dissatisfied with the term that he introduced because it's preposterous, it's a ridiculous term and it sits There, because it's the only thing that we think can go in that slot without sort of entering a check kiting problem where you have to introduce new fields and then you create more debt that you have to pay off later. So if you don't want to get into that problem, you have to accept it's some constant that falls out of the heavens. Exaggeratedly tiny level multiplying the metric because the metric is itself annihilated by its own derivative operator. And so because of a product rule in calculus, it has to be lambda some constant times little g mu knew the metric. And that technically can sort of accommodate dark energy.

But it's preposterous. So assume that the experimental result fell apart. I'd be in the same place I was in the 80s. This is not going to hold. This is completely artificial. Einstein was correct. And if he'd had the courage of his convictions, I think what he would have done is to recognize that the entire Einstein field equations cannot live on in this fashion. Where you've got one term that's perfect and two terms that are ungainly to say the least and preposterous to say more.