We prove that Grothendieck-Witt spaces of Poincaré categories are, in many cases, group completions of certain moduli spaces of hermitian forms. This, in particular, identifies Karoubi’s classical hermitian and quadratic $\mathrm K$-groups with the genuine Grothendieck-Witt groups from our joint work with Calmès, Dotto, Harpaz, Land, Moi, Nardin and Nikolaus, and thereby completes our solution of several conjectures in hermitian K-theory.

The method of proof is abstracted from work of Galatius and Randal-Williams on cobordism categories of manifolds using the identification of the Grothendieck-Witt space of a Poincaré category as the homotopy type of the associated cobordism category. In memory of Bruce Williams.

Schinzel’s Hypothesis (H) was used by Colliot-Thélène and Sansuc, and later by Serre, Swinnerton-Dyer and others, to prove that the Brauer–Manin obstruction controls the Hasse principle and weak approximation on pencils of conics and similar varieties. We show that when the ground field is $\mathbb{Q}$ and the degenerate geometric fibres of the pencil are all defined over $\mathbb{Q}$, one can use this method to obtain unconditional results by replacing Hypothesis (H) with the finite complexity case of the generalised Hardy–Littlewood conjecture recently established by Green, Tao and Ziegler.