Actor Terrence Howard has some well, novel and unique theories on maths and physics, which are a bit out there. The 55-year-old, who does not have a formal education or background in maths or physics is self-taught and feels he has gained paradigm-changing insights into the fields.

He joined Joe Rogan and scientist Eric Weinstein on the former’s podcast, where the scientist addressed the actor’s theories and populations one by one. During the podcast, the scientist also explained why he felt Howard would never be peer-reviewed, a first step to any theory being taken seriously.

Weinstein thinks Howard doesn’t have enough to get peer-reviewed

Eric Weinstein felt that Howard was not getting peer-reviewed in any scientific journals for one simple reason. The ‘Empire’ actor, according to the scientist, is self-taught, and as such unaware of the field and of the formal lexicon within it.

“Let me explain where you are. Neil is not unaware that you are never going to get your hearing in a peer-reviewed journal. Your ideas are going to come through, you’re a self-taught autodidactic polymath. You haven’t been cleaned up. You haven’t been taught how to speak properly, you don’t know the fact that when you say loop we know you mean fix point. I know how to do all this stuff, right,” he said.

This, Weinstein felt, was a shame since some of what Howard was saying had some actual value and was a novel approach to looking at things.

“You’re not getting a peer review from me, I know a lot more than you do about a lot of this stuff. You’re getting Elite reviewed and my Elite review says that a lot of this is bath water but a small amount of this is baby and that’s not available anywhere,” Weinstein added.

Howard had accused famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of not giving his theories a fair shake despite him having reached out to him. This prompted Tyson to make a response, giving his version of events of their interaction and debunking the actor’s theories. In his response, the ‘Cosmos’ presenter felt that Howard was a victim of the Dunning-Krueger effect.

The Dunning-Krueger effect basically postulates that the less one knows about a topic, the more confident they are in their abilities. Conversely, the more one is an expert in a topic, the less certain and confident they are in their abilities. In addition, the astrophysicist felt that Howard needed to be peer-reviewed if he wanted to be taken seriously by the scientific community. This brought him to another reason why the ‘Empire’ star would not get peer-reviewed.

Weinstein tells Joe Rogan and Howard what needs to happen for the latter to be taken seriously

Weinstein, who himself is a long-time critic of some aspects of the peer-review process, told Howard and Rogan that the peer-review process would not only be closed to the actor because of his lack of formal education in science but also because he doesn’t have an affiliation with an existing educational institution.

“It’s not available in a university, it’s not available in a journal. That’s available on The Joe Rogan Experience. And you know Neil’s right. If what you want is peer review you should go to a journal and they will laugh you out. They will take one look at your email address and if it doesn’t end in ‘edu’, I promise you you’re not going to get heard,” he told Howard.

Because of this, Weinstein advised Howard to concentrate on the phrasing of his theories and his messaging if he wanted to be taken seriously by the scientific community. The scientist also pointed out that while science is open to anyone, there is a lot of hard work that needs to be done in science which he felt Howard had somewhat skipped.