I do agree the whole paper is bull. Equations (1) and (2) are strictly speaking wrong, but you'd see these kinds of expressions if you are talking informally about these things. (1) should be a Riemann tensor, so its mostly wrong. For (2) it is a bit more general than R=0, since you could have Einsteinian manifolds and can make that redefinition. But yeah, without explaining anything, it's just nonsense.

No shade to OP. Something like this isn't likey to trip BS alarms unless youre already aware of how big this should be. and it's the kinda thing that isn't sexy enough to grab public attention, which lends some credence.

like, I read a headline like, "FUSION MAKES POWER NOW, FUSION POWER PLANTS EXPECTED NEXT YEAR" and I know it's BS. But part of that is the way it promises to affect your life, and it does do in terms of Fusion, which enough people would recognize so as to make their eyeballs valuable.

This article has neither of those really. So yeah. No shade.

(Edit: guess the words "magical equation" is a pretty quick tip off too lol)

Running the title though Google and looking at the discussions around it in various corners of the Internet seems to indicate it's utter bunk.

What they are doing is just nonsense. You can use the four normal constants: gravitational, speed of light, plancks constant, boltzman constant, or the Planck ones, also four (time, mass, length, temperature). What they do is just rewrite the G, c and h-bar, the only ones that appear here, in their equations and it turns out just only two appear in the equations. Which two? Planck length and "energy", where planck energy is a combination of time and mass... so it is still three! All this nonsense to try to say something of no particular interest: if you look at a very small subset of expressions you can probably redefine some constants conviniently to get rid of others.

If a constant is defined by another constant, without a variable between, wouldn't it be fair to simplify that into a single constant? Additionally, based solely on the article, it almost sounds like they're inverting that, saying that Planck time and Planck length determine the speed of light and gravitational constant(?).