The Wolfram Physics Project
writings.stephenwolfram.com
writings.stephenwolfram.com
All: no more Wolfram Derangement Syndrome comments, please. They're off topic because they're always the same, and they compose into a weird counterversion of the very thing they're deriding.
Since this comment was becoming top heavy, I forked it. If you want the meta-meta stuff, it's this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22869384.
1. make a set of dynamical rules that matches general relativity in the low energy limit, such as recovering Lorentz invariance and the Einstein field equation (this is supposed to be the easiest part -- without at least doing this, a theory of everything is worth less than the graph doodles in my middle school notebooks)
2. demonstrate that you can add something that looks like matter
3. reproduce effects that we know have to appear in quantum gravity in the semiclassical limit, such as Hawking radiation and black hole entropy
4. demonstrate that you can add matter that behaves like the Standard Model
5. make specific predictions that we didn't already know from purely semiclassical considerations
6. find a way to verify those predictions
7. have the predictions actually be correct upon verification
These 7 steps are hard, which is why nobody has managed to do them. But it looks like Wolfram hasn't even bothered to start on step 1. His new book is just hundreds and hundreds of pages of pretty graphs and big words. It's more akin to a reformulation of the foundations of mathematics than a theory of physics -- and it's not a particularly good one, at that.
It's the same complaint I have about category theorists trying to do applied physics. (And category theory is a much more powerful language than Wolfram's!) Yes, you might have an incredibly general language, with which you can talk about vast swaths of possible physical theories. But we already had way too many possibilities using ordinary mathematics! We need to narrow down on specifics, not muddy the waters by making things even more general. I mean, it's like trying to rescue a startup by translating the documentation into Esperanto.
http://wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some-re...
(2) The article above already discusses the derivation of the matter contribution to the Lagrangian density, the derivation of energy-momentum tensor, and Lorentz transformations for elementary particles.
(3) Both Hawking radiation and black hole entropy, and connections between our formalism and the AdS-CFT correspondence, are detailed here:
http://wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some-qu...
(4) We do not yet know how to do this.
(5) The quantum mechanics paper above makes, for instance, quite specific predictions about the location of stretched horizons around non-semiclassical black holes.
(6) (7) This we are still working on.
Skimming through it, the links between the specific physics and the general statements about graphs seem to me to be rather weak. A typical section looks like setting up a bunch of very general definitions about graphs, and then suddenly jumping into a standard physics derivation in standard physics notation without even using the definitions you set up a page earlier. In other words, the graph stuff seems to not be doing much of the work!
But I do admit that I only skimmed. This could be an unfair assessment. I hope your papers get a good, thorough peer review.
"The class of problems that can be solved efficiently by quantum computers should be identical to the class of problems that can be solved efficiently by classical computers: More precisely, we predict in this appropriately coarse-grained case that P=BQP, where P and BQP denote the complexity classes of polynomial time and bounded error quantum polynomial time, respectively."
And:
"In other words, in order to maintain a causal invariant representation, the observer must perform a sufficient level of coarse-graining to ensure that any apparent advantage obtained through the use of a quantum computer over a classical one is effectively lost."
Am I missing something fundamental (most probably)? Are you predicting that quantum computers will not be able to, for example, factor RSA keys much faster than todays non-quantum machines?
Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft also has a cellular automaton theory and one of his conclusions is: "If engineers ever succeed in making such quantum computers, it seems to me that the CAT is falsified; no classical theory can explain quantum mechanics." By "such quantum computers" he means computers that can run Shor's algorithm. "...but factoring a number with millions of digits into its prime factors will not be possible – unless fundamentally improved classical algorithms turn out to exist."
> no classical theory can explain quantum mechanics."
Not sure I can agree with 't Hooft on this. A GR-based theory with closed timelike curves can easily have particles travelling through time to interfere with themselves, and thus reproduce the quantum phenomena like the double-slit experiment. There's been some work on this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1gjekn/the_logic_o...
[warning: uninformed tangent]
A more optimistic interpretation could be that quantum & non-quantum machines will be similar because we have huge leaps to make in non-quantum computer architecture.
This is strictly a theoretical thought-experiment for me, but it has always intrigued me that quantum computers sort-of model the problem itself in the hardware circuit & shove a bunch of qubits through it.
In digital computers, we mostly model Boolean logical structures & then, in software, translate our problem into that Boolean logic. This translation into discrete steps places a limit on the theoretical efficiency.
However, perhaps there is room in analog computing hardware to more closely model specific types of optimization problems & then shove a bunch of electrons through it (shouldn’t the electrons follow the path of least resistance?).
Ah, good point.
Though I was more thinking of Shor's algorithm and Grover's algorithm that tells us the theoretical expected performance that could be achieved with quantum computers. Normally these are described as showing the speedup provided by a possible quantum computer (in relation to non-quantum computers).
So, when reading the Wolfram Model paper I cited, I read the statement regarding quantum computers as dismissing the possibility of achieving qantum computers capable of realising Shor's and Grover's.
But one could of course read it in a flip-side way, that there are algorithms out there to be discovered that achieves the same lower bound complexities on non-quantum machines.
Considering that the Wolfram Model is all about graphs and cellular automata, the statement should probably be considered not based on a RAM complexity model, but something like PRAM that considers parallelism.
Congratulations, you've rediscovered quantum annealing!
However, rarely are arxiv publications accompanied by such fan fare.
1. a rebranding with improved documentation / learning resources for using those features (hey, documentation is hard! discoverability matters!), and
2. a set of really impressive rendering algorithms for visualizing these sorts of systems. (hey, visualizing mathematical objects is quite substantive! I'll happily pay good money for "low-effort pretty charts"!)
I addressed in the companion thread why I don't think this is particularly likely to result in "a new type of physics": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22866284
Mathematica is good software. Pre-wolframengine I did shell out the $2K for Mathematica because it contains best-in-class implementations of some important algorithms. A high-quality reimplementation that matches Mathematica's performance would take me several years (in an area where I have a phd). Wolfram Research employs smart folks and lets them spend their time writing really high quality code, and the only way to access that code is by calling Mathematica's built-in functions.
But just because the goal is perhaps a bit grandois and the presentation definitely breathless doesn't mean there's "nothing of substance".
[1] https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Tools/guide-...
Building a more general tool can sometimes solve a specific problem than trying to tackle the specific problem directly.
I also think you're missing the forest for the trees here. There are many general relationships in physics that are spontaneously appearing in the structure of Wolfram's hypergraphs. That's interesting enough on its own to be worth further research.
In one sense, this shared structure shouldn't be surprising, because it's often harder to not make something Turing complete, so in a way I expect a lot of shared structure between physics and various general computational models. On the other hand, it's getting harder to squeeze more progress out of traditional approaches, so shrinking a computational model to exactly match physics on long timescales is a unique attack vector worth exploring.
I have an unfounded suspicion that there exists a simple algebra akin to a continuous geometric algebra that allows all of physics and only physics.
Something that's bothered me for years about contemporary physics is the use of constraints "on top of" a general purpose algebra over the infinite precision real or complex numbers.
Mathematicians would argue that it's all "equivalent", but to me it feels arbitrary and in a sense missing the point. The final theory whatever it is, shouldn't sound like "everything except almost everything leaving one thing". It should sound like "this one thing only, that can be no other thing".
A friend of mine once put it this way: Ask a mathematician to describe a Rubik's Cube and he'll start with the space of all possible transformations, whittle it down to some space of discrete modular transformations by throwing out all other continuous and infinite transformations, then by throwing out even more transformations eventually wind up with a set of rules that matches a Rubik's Cube. If you ask him to draw what it looks like he'll start spouting about how that's impossible and you just need to "learn the maths", pointing at a stack of textbooks.
Modern theoretical physics has the same problem.
> If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery. It is very nearly impossible, but not quite, to find any theory which agrees with experiments over the entire range in which all theories have been checked, and yet gives different consequences in some other range, even a theory whose different consequences do not turn out to agree with nature. A new idea is extremely difficult to think of. It takes a fantastic imagination.
Right now I'm toying around with a particularly mathematically elegant model with (IMHO) incredibly beautiful "symmetry" in the sense that the equations are both trivially simple yet capable of producing a rich particle zoo, but still limited to a small finite set. My problem is that I'd need a few petabytes of memory to play around with it sufficiently to see if it passes the basic tests.
I'm hoping Moore's law will allow me to run some simulations before I die of old age...
It’s $5M/mo to rent 1 PB of RAM on EC2 and $21,000/mo per PB in S3.
Conceivably, your dreams will be possible in a decade — they are feasible, but likely too costly now.
Best of luck!
I will quote you with this amazing analogy. Thank you!
https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/potent...
Languages are just packaging. In order to have content, you have to nail down specifics, and here the choice of language can be useful because the specifics might be more naturally expressed in some languages than others. But Wolfram hasn't begun this journey.
...
also,
> In our previous paper[1], we formally introduced the Wolfram Model[2] - a new discrete spacetime formalism in which space is represented by a hypergraph, and in which laws of physics are modeled by transformation rules on set systems - and investigated its various relativistic and gravitational properties in the continuum limit, as first discussed in Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science (NKS)[3]. Our central result was the proof that large classes of such models, with transformation rules obeying particular constraints, were mathematically consistent with discrete forms of both special and general relativity
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
The article suggests that working out the theory of something like rule production systems, and then figuring out how that theory relates to existing insights from physics, is the best path toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics.
My primary source of skepticism stems from the fact that the theory of rule production systems is not exactly a new area of study. It's been well-developed at various points in time and from various perspectives by the theoretical CS, programming language theory, automated theorem proving, and mathematical logic communities. That theory addresses most of Stephen's "big difficult questions" about the non-physics side of things. For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a very old and extremely well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory.
I sympathize with Stephen. In fact, he sounds a bit like I did early in my scientific career. Unfortunately, though, I just don't see how these old well-understood ideas from computer science are going to result in a new fundamental theory of physics.
What are the old names for these ideas?
Besides, Stephen's approach here is to ignore 15-20 years of research from various CS sub-communities; his best case scenario is spending a decade reinventing that wheel. The problem with cross-talk that isn't "humble on both sides" is that it's either a) a waste of time because one side's ideas aren't that important, or else b) a waste of time because one side has to reinvent the other wise.
In terms of "humility on both sides", it's such a common theme that this oft-cited assumption is taken as truth. Some of the greatest minds who had the most impact in our history were also insufferable assholes, who were stubborn and would not yield until people were forced to reckon with their ideas. Is this me defending Wolfram's ideas? No. But it's me defending the idea that "humility and civility" as a prerequisite for scientific advancement seems false, and in fact, in stagnant fields, the need for a disruptive personality who happens to be right may be perhaps the only real way out of the rut.
The problem, in the very particular case of this blog post, is that the cost for lacking intellectual humility is spending time reinventing other people's wheels. And those wheels won't get him as far as he thinks they will. We know because they've already been built by others.
> Everything in physics and physical reality must have a digital informational representation.
Can you go into a little more detail about the other versions of these ideas? What are they called in other theories?
What are the names for these old, well-studied things in programming language theory, so we can look them up?
I've decided that I do not have the time or interest in writing the Related Work section for a paper-length blog post touching on an enormous number of fields, some of which I know well and some of which I haven't thought about in a decade. (As an aside, one real and substantive problem with trying to build a research program without taking the time to share a survey and comparison with related work is that you'll have difficulty communicating with others. It will then take extra effort on others' part to build up a knowledge base. Surveying and comparing to related work is hard and thankless but important work. It's not about credit, it's about building up a shared knowledge base.)
However, I can spare an hour or two and take the time to flesh out one or two in order to demonstrate what I mean.
So, I'll make the following offer: is there any particular excerpt from Stephen's blog post to which you would like the CS/PL/info theory analogue? Or, would you prefer me to pick a particular sentence and identify the body of work that explores that question and the major results of that body of work? (I will take this opportunity to emphasize the "about the non-physics side of things" portion of my original post.)
I'm going to link to this thread in other places where people have asked this question instead of monitoring 3 or 4 different threads going forward. I'll do my best to occasionally monitor this thread for requests and do my best to reply. FYI, I probably won't get around to answering more than one reply until the weekend.
I don't understand how things could be extremely well studied and developed, but also not exist in some fashion where you could just name and link to it in a matter of minutes rather than hours. Example "emulation cones are called X here".
I've listened to Wolfram and skimmed one of his books before deciding he's beyond my ability to evaluate as genius or crackpot. I'd love to be able to nail down a specific thing where I could read about some existing topic and then read about Wolfram claiming to reinvent it or something, because that could help me learn towards one conclusion over the other in the genius versus crackpot consideration.
One frustrating thing that I often find is that much of Wolfram criticism is non-specific and as it's impossible for me to bucket Wolfram I can't bucket his critics either because they tend not to provide enough detail or clarity.
Emulation cones go by various names, but perhaps the most common is the (bounded) reflexive and transitive closure of a reduction rules of a system. Another common name is the (bounded) reachable set.
Rulial spaces, by which I mean the particular ones Stephen seems interested in toward the end, are higher order term rewriting systems or higher order syntax. But actually, rulial space is used throughout the text in a much more general sense. I'd consider even very canonical results from PL theory, e.g. confluence of rewriting, to be non-trivial observations about a particular rulial space.
The reason for giving (or at least very vaguely hinting at) a definition for rulial spaces and emulation cones is to talk about foliations and then expressiveness. There's some connection between foliation and bisimulation that's difficult to exactly nail down, because nailing it down requires a lot more precision about the exact sort of (emulation cones we are interested in and for which) spaces. The connection between expressiveness and complexity hierarchies is immediately obvious, I think, right?
> One frustrating thing that I often find is that much of Wolfram criticism is non-specific and as it's impossible for me to bucket Wolfram I can't bucket his critics either because they tend not to provide enough detail or clarity.
Oy, no good deed goes unpunished :)
Look, I get why it's frustrating.
But, really, there's a reason that rule #0 of technical writing is to define terms before using them. The reader can only do so much.
If these concepts don't have a single name that you can just rattle off, and that we can Google - if describing them in terms of existing theory would take serious effort - then surely identifying and naming them is a major contribution?
Maybe you could advise some developed language or model for this task? The interesting part is to have code-data duality and enough rich language to kick start natural selection that would produce competing algorithms that would gradually become more and more complex (and gradually become closer to sentience).
Though the language might not even be Truring complete as it is. As natural assumption would be that the model should be finite in resources and it can get access to infinite time or memory only in time limit (assuming that the individual algorithms would survive for this to happen).
>For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a very old and extremely well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory.'
What's the old well-studied idea, and the well-developed programming theory idea? A one sentence reply is fine.
"However, were the book more cautious in its claims and more willing to acknowledge previous work, it would likely be easier for readers to assess what it does offer: a cellular-automaton-based perspective on existing ideas in science"
In order to be useful, this model should either create a new testable prediction or speed up computations in existing models while retaining accuracy. It seems to be in the latter camp. I would like to understand more about why this model is more computationally efficient.
Perhaps there’s more work to be done on the process of generating rules or limiting the types of rules. Arbitrarily choosing rules to create properties that look similar to observed physical properties doesn’t seem to point to a fundamental theory.
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
Edit: Additionally the model seems very flexible. To the point that I’m unsure whether it’s surprising to be able to recover GR and other properties. I’m out of my depth here but given that string theory seems to face a similar problem of model selection have you looked at equivalences between those or does this not make sense in your eyes?
"However, once one has truly absorbed and internalized this realization, it leads to an exceedingly tantalizing possibility: that perhaps, lying somewhere out there in the computational universe, is the rule for our physical universe[2]. If an entity as remarkable as Rule 30 could be found just by an exhaustive search,then perhaps so too can a theory of fundamental physics.[3] The idea that there could exist some elementary computational rule[4] that successfully reproduces the entirety of the physical universe at first seems somewhat absurd, although there does not appear to be any fundamental reason (neither in physics, nor mathematics,nor philosophy) to presume that such a rule could not exist. Moreover, if there is even a remote possibility that such a rule could exist, then it’s slightly embarrassing for us not to be looking for it. The objective of the Wolfram Physics Project is to enact this search.[5]"
[0] There is in fact only one idea in that book, and this is that idea. But is this an original idea? When computer scientists and mathematicians come up with novel results in programming language theory or type theory (or whatever) what is to stop them claiming that they are empirically exploring a "computational universe"?
[1] Probably, but not to programmers, or the computationally literate.
[2] An extraordinary leap within the context of the introduction. Though note, neither is this an original idea, that the universe may be "digital" is not an idea original to Wolfram and it redates his magnum opus by I don't know how many years. Note there are actual physics projects that seek to kick the tyres this hypothesis.
Have you got that so far? A recasting in lofty terms of an unoriginal idea followed by a a giant leap to another unoriginal idea which serves only to motivate the project.
[3] So you say, but this is a giant non-sequitur.
[4] Why just one rule? And the rule hardly runs itself. What does it run on? Great you have a generalised term-rewriting system (how completely un-novel). "What rewrites the terms?* How is this not the first question you ask yourself?
[5] Hey, why not just say: “You know that "it from bit" idea? We have a hunch that term rewriting hypergraphs is the way to go. These are our explorations. We've encountered stuff that echoes contemporary physics.” Why not write the intro like that? Not grandiose enough for you?
===
Any sufficiently worthy "it from bit" project must answer the following questions.
(1) Given that we know that any sufficiently powerful computing system can emulate any another what motivates your choosing this particular computational system and model?
(2) Demonstrate convincing physics (not toy models)
(3) Make testable predictions – this is not something for "down the line", this is what theories of anything must do. No predictions, no dice, no matter how nice.
(4) Is it software all the way down? If so, how? If not, what is the hardware and what does that imply?
(5) I would direct this last point at all TOE-heads like Wolfram and Weinstein and whoever. Why does it have to be simple? Why does it have to be elegant? Why is it always encoded in the formal systems you happen to play around with (geometry for Weinstein, term-rewriting systems / cellular automata for Wolfram).
===
I think the wider scientific community needs to call time on savants like Weinstein and Wolfram.
Is a specific combination of rules not itself a rule? A lot of descriptions of Conway's Game of Life describe it as multiple rules, and other places refer to its whole setup as a "rule". Rule 30 is sometimes called a "rule set". I don't think there's a strict difference between a rule set and a rule, though the simpler rule(set) the better seems to be easy to agree on.
...
>(5) I would direct this last point at all TOE-heads like Wolfram and Weinstein and whoever. Why does it have to be simple? Why does it have to be elegant?
A theory with fewer free parameters is better than one with more. I think this extends to the complexity of the theory too: a theory with more rules (rule A applies to small stuff, rule B applies to big stuff, rule AB-patch applies to mediumish stuff) is worse than as a theory that explains the same stuff with fewer rules (a single rule X that naturally has A-behavior with small stuff and B-behavior with big stuff) in the same way a theory with more free parameters is worse than a theory with similar predictions and fewer free parameters.
It's Occam's Razor. Complex theories can have lots of different variants that each match the existing evidence but make different predictions in untested scenarios. Simpler theories have fewer variants that successfully match the existing evidence and tend to be more useful for making predictions, indicating that they match reality better.
>And the rule hardly runs itself. What does it run on? Great you have a generalised term-rewriting system (how completely un-novel). "What rewrites the terms?* How is this not the first question you ask yourself?
Is that not an obstacle for any theory? Tons of theories are meant to model what we see, without presuming some underlying mechanism. Newton came up with a theory of gravitation that modeled how objects tend to pull each other in without any idea of why nature chose for that to happen.
Even if the idea that not explaining what executes the rule of reality is a problem, then a simpler theory with fewer rules is obviously better because there's fewer unexplained rules.
>[5] Hey, why not just say: “You know that "it from bit" idea? We have a hunch that term rewriting hypergraphs is the way to go. These are our explorations. We've encountered stuff that echoes contemporary physics.” Why not write the intro like that? Not grandiose enough for you?
Personally, I found their intro to have a lot more background detail and motivation explained. Is your primary objection really that they were too grand for a few paragraphs?
>(1) Given that we know that any sufficiently powerful computing system can emulate any another what motivates your choosing this particular computational system and model?
Any system capable of having relativity and QM-like effects emerge out of it as described is interesting enough to study, even if it did end up having defects that meant it couldn't be a good model of reality overall.
I feel like you're treating this as if he's asking everyone to commit themselves fully to this model instead of to explore it.
>(5) I would direct this last point at all TOE-heads like Wolfram and Weinstein and whoever. Why does it have to be simple? Why does it have to be elegant? Why is it always encoded in the formal systems you happen to play around with (geometry for Weinstein, term-rewriting systems / cellular automata for Wolfram).
Presumably they chose those systems to play around to begin with because they believe those systems were promising.
I've long assumed that the basic structure of the universe must be some kind of graph, simply because it's the most elementary structure there seems to be, and so easily gives rise to dimensionality. So seeing someone try to tackle this bottom-up and see if it can ultimately give rise to quantum mechanics and beyond sure is fun to watch.
[1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
Do you mean this literally, or rather: "the basic structure of the universe CAN BE DESCRIBED by some kind of graph"?
Then particles and energy are patterns in the graph -- that we can describe useful physics in terms of the graph, but that the graph just is, it's not a description or approximation of something deeper.
Unless there's a semantic difference you're getting at that I'm not aware of?
...but therefore that base isn't ever going to be made of anything itself, by definition. It just is. It is what it's described as -- no more, no less.
It's not going to be material or energy. I suppose "information" is probably as good a word as any if you want to think of it that way.
I think that's being too closed minded about what a fundamental theory of the universe will look like. The only way it could be like that is if that fundamental structure is the only fully general option available.
Even just a demonstration that rule application on hypergraphs is expressive enough to potentially describe (for some rule yet to be found) Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity is incredibly exciting in my opinion.
Arguably string theory is in a similar situation: a very powerful framework that could potentially describe reality if accurately utilized.
Also, notably Gerard 't Hooft has been working on a very similar topic recently: Quantum Mechanics described in terms of cellular automata [0].
If you're interested in the subject and also can appreciate what feels like a piece of performance art give the following book a shot: https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Information-Theory-Psychedelic-... It's mind-blowing and uses as one of its starting points Wofram's 1D cellular automata work.
Coincidental timing of publication - one day after John Conway's passing. We may be in a n-dimensional Game of Life after all.
Just a few years laters, people quickly translated this to graphs - a network. The spacial interpretation aside, the idea surely should hold for higher dimensional social relations.
And that's where we reach and interesting point that Wolfram writes about: These system are useful, as long as we can calculate or derive a state. If all we can do is simulate it, then it's much less useful. And indeed, creating such models is the true "art".
So while the "idea" of using relations and hypergraphs lays a foundation that I am sympathetic to, I also feel like the things "on the to do list" are, indeed, the meat of the issue.
Starting with cellular automata is flipping the table over and starting the game anew, starting with discrete models instead of continuous models, with the ultimate goal of producing a purely discrete theory for all of physics.
Discretizing everything has the potential to provide new mathematical tools and new insights that our continuous theories might obscure. There's a lot of hidden computation in the reals and complex numbers that a discrete theory would have to explicitly unpack, and some of these details might potentially shed light on some real puzzles.
't Hooft, Gerard: The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41285-6
Reference number 23.
But a graph has nodes and edges. Nodes, in this case, can be particles.. I guess? But what are the edges? When a "simple rule" is applied to a collection of particles, what is the force that connects them after the interaction? I read some of the material in detail and skimmed some of the rest, but there was a lot of setup and cool graph visualizations and not a lot speaking to this core question.
Disclaimer: I'm not a theoretical physicist but I have read "Quantum Physics for Babies" at least 50 times.
Save your time, just read More is Different: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
The idea then was the following: We do not need "randomness" and probability theory in our models, once we realize that deterministic systems, even simple ones, can produce arbitrarily complex outcomes.
For example, this was all the rage in economics in the 90's. Surely, those are dynamical systems and besides having an actual proper reason for probabilistic reasoning, one wanted to at least consider that modeling deterministic systems without any randomness could fit reality.
I also make this point because in this instance, graph based discrete models often have a continuous equivalent and it depends on the case which of those offers more useful outcomes.
If I remember correctly, the hype about chaotic systems died down in part because while we could formulate substantively powerful foundations, it was extremely difficult to "get something useful out of it" and it all seemed to go more or less nowhere.
But I don't think there's much in the way of existing theoretical math attacking this area.
Much will need to be invented / discovered.
K.H. Knuth, a professor at Albany, has been working on this for some time. He also has some results about QM.
A free version of his paper "A Potential Foundation for Emergent Space-Time" (2014). What Wolfram is talking about seems to me a consequence of the principles K.H. Knuth has been investigating since at least 2011.
It also reminds me of the casual set theory that I heard briefly from a professor a few years ago. I was told that it re-creates vacuum gr just well.
Wolfram claims that they don't need to be; on the contrary. Take another look at the last section of the article.
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
Or, for a less technical version of the basic idea:
https://www.wolframphysics.org/questions/quantum-mechanics/h...
I find it interesting that under this theory regions of space and properties of objects are emergent phenomena. I suspect that under some variants of the theory, properties of objects could act as if they are both random and non local.
There is literally nothing in his model that can prevent his beautiful graphs from simply collapsing in on themselves, with all the points just piling up on top of each other into a naked singularity before they've even succeeded at forming any space at all!
For starters, empty space should have weighted (space-like) connections of the weight value of 1.
This accomplishes two things: a) prevents the space from outright collapsing in on itself, and b) forces the space to form a stable configuration
For b) part, imagine a 2-dimensional discrete space (graph) made of hexagonal shapes.
You will immediately notice that weighing knot (node) connections (with the value of 1) forces that space to maintain a stable spherical configuration (providing that it had formed uniformly to start with.
Expand this concept to 3 dimensions, and you'll get a similarly stable 3D configuration (that has been uniformly expanding from the very first step of 1), with 2D surface (at any distance r/step k from the center) being a very good candidate for defining a holographic principle (of some form or another) on.
Now...
... wait for Wofram to expand his model with weighted graphs... and then sue his sorry ass for stealing somebody else's idea.
P.S. One of the fundamental flaws of WPP's meta-meta-model is... Wolfram himself.
A terrible, terrible choice for managing the, literally, biggest breakthrough in physics since QM.
Until this is achieved (finally giving the complete description of this discrete space/graph of this space), nothing further can be done in physics.
Furthermore... it is not even needed to prove that this space is discrete, because uncertainty principle already proves that it is, by taking notice of the fact that in continuous spaces, quanta of action/momentum/energy can be made arbitrarily small (and, in fact, is equal to 0), which means that h can be made arbitrarily small (and, in fact, is equal to 0).
In other words, uncertainty principle only makes makes sense in discrete spaces... and, as experiments (from 100+ years ago) have already proven, h > 0 in the space this universe is made of (meaning that this space is discrete). Q.E.D.
Edit: typo and... typo with missing constant 2 from circumference formula.
Addition: Pi is Pi only because of the spatial (graph) configuration. In another uniform space, with a different configuration, circumference formula would have the form of: Nk=aCk, where a is some value (like 2), and C is the (Pi-like) constant derived from spatial (graph) configuration >alone<.
Edit: Added missing k to the general circumference formula. I should really proof-read better, but I'm in a kind of hurry, so you'll forgive me an occasional mistake or two.
Have you though about how the spin of particles could work in this framework? And have you though about what it would look like to extend local gauge invariance from spacetime to multiway?
(I haven't read the actual papers and the assumptions that went into them yet, but to the summary is very impressive and exciting: a basic framework that can derive general relativity and path integral, put them together in equal footing in an extended "multiway", possibly give natural explanations to several long-standing puzzles of physics [dark matter, dark energy, black holes, black hole information paradox, measurement problem, inflation, dimensionality of the universe, arrow of time, ...]. I don't know if you can eventually find a rule that will result in the standard model, but everything fits so far, and it is possibly not a coincidence. Great work so far! Of course, it may or not may not lead to something that recovers all of the physics that we know today, but regardless, thanks for pursuing this exciting avenue!)
Physics noob here, but I do a lot of theory / model development in other areas, at work and in my batcave. So I'm wondering: What if there are multiple fundamental theories, just like there are millions of different ways of looking at things, all with their various leverage/application points?
> we’re going to have to find the specific rule for our universe
I just wonder what makes someone so sure there is a specific rule, when humans are good at generating untold numbers of rules, and in my experience those rules can be very effective _and_ work best together when held lightly, rather than exclusively. (If anything, humans seem more likely to become dangerously dogmatic when they feel they have identified "the one" of something. Like a human anti-pattern.)
Looking at the way he's evaluating universes and aiming to find one that's so well matched to ours, just intuitively I also have to wonder how many different ways there are of modeling our universe that are worth keeping around no matter how poorly they fit in even some big ways.
Interesting stuff to think about though.
I always thought science was biased toward the assumption that the universe follows basic deterministic rules, and the purpose of doing science was to find the nature of those rules. What I mean by this, is that when we do science, we are trying to determine the nature behind things - are we not? Therefore, determining things, or determinism, is at the heart of doing science. Assuming otherwise, seems like a disservice to practicing science, but maybe that's just me?
Granted, I know nothing is settled yet, but I have a hard time seeing anything new here. Just old ideas communicated in an analogous new perspective…
okie dokie
Among the many many many red flags, Wolfram claims to have discovered that complexity can emerge from simple rules in the early 80's. This is a full decade after P. W. Anderson's seminal paper [More is Different](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393).
In fact, if you haven't RTFA yet, save your time and just read the original, rigorous, less self-aggrandizing paper: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393
Total red flag. His obsession with this - though - does not seem ill placed. As far as smell tests go, I think this thread is worth pulling.
Do I need a journal membership?
http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72mo...
Though I must admit I don’t really understand it. I was expecting automata to be referenced somewhere.
I enjoyed A New Kind of Science, though I feel like it would have been a much shorter book if Wolfram included less self-aggrandizing.
It's more fundamental than automata papers, so of course it doesn't address automata, but automata papers should reference it.
"A New Kind of Science proposed ideas that were not new, were not kind, and were not science. Discuss."
Other interesting related theories might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_aggregation or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington#Fundamental_t...
"Eddington believed he had identified an algebraic basis for fundamental physics, which he termed 'E-numbers' .... These in effect incorporated spacetime into a higher-dimensional structure. While his theory has long been neglected by the general physics community...."
Humanity will be around for, well, a few more years, not a blink of the universe's eye. Our grandchildren will have time to look into things, if civilization doesn't collapse. What are the odds that they will decide we were right, that the universe really is something we know about already?
One critic remark to make: I am not impressed by the "complex looks" of the hypergraphs because the initial premise is that it does not matter how we visualise them.
At the time of writing this comment, the majority of responses here are just calling the guy a pompous crank, rather than pointing out specific issues with the central claims of the proposal. Funny that this is on the website created by the guy who proposed the Hierarchy of Disagreement [0]. There are many comments with valid critiques, but so far there are more of the other kind.
Yeah, Wolfram and Weinstein have some eccentricities, and the intro section to this is kind of unnecessary and grating and could probably be cut out, but they're also very intelligent people who have discovered and created things which are both "new and true" (and/or new and useful) rather than merely "true or new, mutually exclusively" as people like to snidely parrot.
I'm not saying this theory or Weinstein's theory aren't necessarily irreparably riddled with holes. Just that the nature of the criticism often seems bizarre, poor quality, and directed at their personalities rather than their content, like in this comment section. It'd be much more refreshing to see it be criticized on its merits rather than its tone or the personality traits of its author.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_D...
This is regardless of the specific rule that computes our universe. Also since that rule is Turing complete, it's going to be the same as every other Turing complete rule, and since we can't produce a machine IN the universe that can simulate the universe, it kinda doesn't matter what the rule is.
http://www.wolframphysics.org/visual-summary/
Based on this image alone, having not yet read the article, it looks like he’s taken his prior insights on cellular automata (Conway’s Game type stuff) and advanced them forward to quarks and Feynman diagrams.
I typically have a very rough time with Wolfram’s writing but the image is, at least, simple enough to follow. “What are the rules for particle timeflows?” is certainly a question that’s interesting though my phrasing is probably terrible.
EDIT: Yup, it’s definitely quarks X cellular automata. Clearly an extension of previous Wolfram work, still just as enthusiastic / savior-ish as ever. I hope it pans out somehow in pragmatic real world outcomes someday. Bonus link to diagram showing a fate decision tree behaving like a Conway glider:
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2020/04/040...
Note that I have no idea if Wolfram is right or not, but I’m glad I tried and failed to read New Kind of Science years ago. The mindset/approach were worth it and make it possible to follow along with today’s post.
I wonder if this hapless postdoc-equivalent is going to get sued, too!
So, hats off. Even if this isn't the Big Idea, maybe it'll end up sparking an idea in someone else's head down the road that gets us there.
I'm genuinely not sure why you believe this especially as we live in an era when theoretical physics and experimental physics are becoming so entwined and the product is a fairly successful testing of our models of physics.
There doesn't seem to have been any widely accepted fundamental theoretical breakthrough like general relativity or quantum mechanics for a long time, nor has there been any widely accepted way to unify the two theories. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the impression I and many others have.
Co Sider biology. What is the last major biology idea that made a huge public splsh? DNA? The human genome sequence? But are biologists stuck the world round? Of course not there have been hundreds if not thousands of notable biology findings in the past 20 years.
Theoretical physics probably simply appears stuck to us because as lay people we focus on a couple of large scale questions that for now are probably out of reach. But we don't consider the hundreds of theoretical physics refinements and observations that need to go into the development of the LHC or LIGO or James Webb etc.
Anyway, that's just like my opinion man.
Human genome editing using CRISPR-Cas9 a few years ago was pretty big tbh.
Basically, people have been building giant ladders and constantly improving them, but we don't know if any of the ladders were put up against the right wall. We have no idea if these theories actually correspond to reality or not. For example, string theory and supersymmetry.
The LHC was created partly with the goal and expectation of detecting particles that would validate supersymmetry, but so far it hasn't, and many are beginning to believe the theory may be flawed or wrong. In some sense that is a bit of a theoretical advancement, but so far, supersymmetry theorists don't appear to have a popular alternative they're considering instead. If they fail to find evidence for it in the next 10 or so years, it's probably just a total dead end. And string theory has been at it for even longer.
I can only gather this from 2nd hand accounts in pop-sci articles and mainstream physics books, but the lack of falsifiability and experimentalism for these things, combined with a large surface area of failed attempts, seems to have left physics in a rut.
I think his work will lay down the foundations of science for centuries to come.
It is curious though. Nearly every criticism I’ve read hasn’t grappled with his ideas—just the man, out of insecurity and ego.
And he’s a lovely writer. I don’t sense ego from him. Just honesty about the work he’s done and contributed. You read him and get the sense his prose is calm—like light particles flowing down a river.
His stories about the remarkable scientists he’s met is some of the best writing I’ve ever read.
He doesn't, and IMO that makes him responsible.
In any case, rational people ought to just get over it.
All: no more Wolfram Derangement Syndrome comments, please. They're off topic because they're always the same, and they compose into a weird counterversion of the very thing they're deriding.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
But if the real experts can't be bothered to say anything, then the only criticism will be from laypeople, and they can only argue based on Wolfram's personality and record -- in other words, Wolfram Derangement Syndrome. If you discourage this, we are left with no criticism at all!
(In reality the situation isn't totally lost, but only because there are "half-experts", i.e. grad students like me, who know just enough to criticize substantively, and just little enough to waste time doing it.)
I am quite confident their criticism will eventually come. "No comment" doesn't mean "I will never comment on this." Criticisms take time to formulate, you'll need to be a bit more patient.
I get your point, though, since as I'm always telling commenters, intent doesn't communicate itself on the internet and the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In a case like this, though, I'm not sure that changing it is the best thing to do, because there's also a cost to the precedent that sets.
What builds up in these threads is an obsession with Wolfram that is even more Wolfram-obsessed than the Wolfram-obsession Wolfram is charged with. This is unmistakeable, and always happens the same way. Out of the material of these comments, a Golem arises that is a variation of the same monster. Arguably even more monstrous: at least Wolfram writes about things other than Wolfram, and very interestingly—just in a way that would take a chemist to separate from its packaging.
I wouldn't get too misled by the polarity being opposite (yay Wolfram-me, boo Wolfram-him). That's only one bit of difference, similar to the negative of a photo. The interesting thing is, what does this arch-enemy that springs out of the internet aether want to talk about? Wolfram wolfram wolfram. And what does it hate the most? How fixated on Wolfram he is.
What makes this fascinating is that in its trivial, internet-in-a-teapot way, it is an example of how we collectively create our own demons. Nietzsche famously said about monsters: be careful when fighting them, lest you become one. Other writers have said: whatever you fight, you create; and so on. That is a profound question. The fact that this is a small and somewhat embarrassing case makes the dynamic easier to see. It's as if it had been isolated in a laboratory for the purposes of studying it—a simple example for early in the textbook.
I know it feels like being obsessed with another is the exact opposite of being obsessed with yourself, but that is how self-deception works: we dress something up as its opposite, so we can have it without seeing it. The gateway into seeing it is to look at how it stirs up your emotions. Why do we create such an intense, and intensely personal, picture of someone whom we don't (as you point out) personally know? Where is that activation coming from? From inside us. $monster just furnishes material.
To my eyes, the collectively specific hn analysis of Wolfram may be interesting, but it is not relevant to moderation of the content. At the same time, succeeding at moderating away the content means that we can't see it, so it can't actually be interesting or even visible to anyone but you.
I do sometimes post out of personal interest or for fun—not often, but it's an old habit. My comment upthread was definitely one of those. If it were just moderation I would have said something more procedural.
Had a bit of an aha moment.
What is the "monster" in this case? Obsession? That's just a feeling; in a vacuum, there's nothing wrong with it. No philosopher, Nietzsche included, would say "obsession" is always bad. If stuff like that could be dealt with in absolutes, then people like Nietzsche wouldn't have spent their lives writing books about the nuance of it. Clearly, for any feeling or action, "obsession" included, the actor and the object both matter. There is a qualitative difference between self-obsession and obsession with someone else.
I fail to see how this is an example of how we "collectively create our own demons." That's a cute turn of phrase, sure, but in its original usage, "demons" refers to one's own insecurities and internal emotional challenges, not every bad thing that exists. Clearly, if you think about it with some nuance, some "demons" exist outside of oneself. Nobody believes that people trapped in poverty have "collectively created" the demon of inequality. Nobody believes that victims of violence "collectively created" the trauma they experienced. In reality, some demons simply exist, at no fault of one's own; the people complaining about Wolfram didn't collectively invent him. He exists, he's writing and funding these huge research projects, and that's a material fact external to the people complaining about him.
As for your last point-yes, technically, everything we think and feel comes from inside us. But that doesn't make everything we think and feel the same.
Just btw, I think that it's generally cringey to vaguely quote Nietzsche (or any philosopher) to defend a point, unless you are a philosopher writing to other philosophers, or you're citing some unique idea of his. And I hate this whole style of writing, to be honest, where one papers over any nuanced interrogation of their beliefs with shoddy references to pop-philosophy.
However, his seminal work titled A New Kind Of Science is frequently critiqued as unscientific in its exposition of its core theories. Other scientific works of SW are similarly criticized for bypassing scientific peer-review and offering little substantive theory. I won't comment further on this so you can form your own opinion.
Here are a collection of reviews of NKS: http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html
Here is my favorite review for its balance and lack of cynicism: https://www.kurzweilai.net/reflections-on-stephen-wolfram-s-...
At the end of the day, say what you want about his theories - he is a wonderful, nurturing man who set me on the course to what I am doing today. He gave me my first programming job and allocated valuable time of the brilliant minds at Wolfram Research toward making even the interns productive and excited to work there. His son Christopher is a mirror of his brilliance and will certainly be making significant contributions to science in his own time.
5 years after I left WR, I received his latest book in the mail with a simple handwritten note - "Is this relevant to what you're working on?". It was. I cherish the man and his mind, despite any criticism directed at his work.
If you really can't stand it then kill the thread. But Wolfram is a bad actor in a discipline that runs on reputation. He needs to be talked about.
This is one of those cases where it's super helpful to have a single thing you're optimizing and for and to know what it is: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... It helps with quickly answering questions that might otherwise be conundrums. A previous example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280
It's important that that is pointed out, not everybody reading them will be aware and may invest time they wouldn't grant to the hundreds of other people promoting their pet Theories of Everything without the benefit of credit with programmers and startup followers.
In contrast, talking about it teaches those who haven't encountered him before how he works. Without that knowledge, one is liable to either get swept up in his aggressive, self-centered reality distortion field or reject him outright as blogspam. Neither response is appropriate. He deserves positive attention for his ideas and negative attention for the reality distortion field, and these discussions serve that purpose.
Here, here!
His company was running accelerated calculus experiments at universities built around Mathematica. There’s a reason your teacher doesn’t want you using a graphing calculator for your algebra homework. I know that now.
Ever since I’ve been carrying around a block of salt for Mr Wolfram and get a lot of schadenfreude out of him showing what a mad scientist he is.
Does anyone remember that self obsessed book he wrote about fifteen years back? Hell I can’t even remember the title. Sure changed the world, didn’t it.
"A New Kind of Science: A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity" (2002)
>As the saying goes, there is much here that is new and true, but what is true is not new, and what is new is not true; and some of it is even old and false, or at least utterly unsupported.
> Q: How do you know if Stephen Wolfram invented something?
> A: He'll tell you.
I saw a TED talk by Conrad Wolfram about using Mathematica as an educational tool [1]. I went to one of my tutorials and tried to discuss it with the Professor (we were encouraged to bring up basically anything we'd seen or encountered in our first few weeks of uni). His response was "I don't think we need to worry about what Conrad Wolfram is saying."
By all accounts, Stephen and Conrad Wolfram are clever men. It is without a doubt that Mathematica is an extraordinary piece of software. Many people here will have benefitted from Wolfram Alpha and will have used Mathematica either in an academic context or in an engineering context.
Stephen Wolfram, however, is not Christ, even though he likes to think so.
Curious to hear what people who actually study this stuff think about this supposedly discovery.
Is he a crank? For a classic definition of crank, no. Does this work represent a clearer understanding of physics than we had prior, or is it an interesting diversion? Harder question, but one has to assume, probably diversion.
On the other hand if time travel or teleportation IS ever invented, my money is that it will be Wolfram.
However, they are different in that Gerard t'Hooft has a single ontic state where Wolfram has branching from undeterministic applications of rules. I'm not sure how Wolfram can derive unitary evolution.
The graph rewriting is cool and novel. I do agree that cellular automata are somewhat limited. Their most obvious limitation is having Manhattan distance. 4 or 8 directions to move through in lower level is something that effects large scale. But most of the models wolfram proposes still produce some grid-like structure, and in some sense his visualization is misleading.
I don't think it's right to call it nondeterministic: every possible sequence of rules happens, separately. It seems to lend itself easily to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM.
Imagine just sitting at home, constantly talking shit and disparaging someone who has dedicated themselves to solving an almost intractably hard problem. And I say that as someone with no particular interest or liking of Wolfram.
My personal intuition is that a new language is only useful if it has enough "meat" to constrain things. For example, most physicists know almost nothing about logic, because it seems so far upstream of everything else that changes in it have no effect. (Indeed, logic has changed a lot in the past 100 years, and nothing happened to us!) But almost everybody in physics agrees that the language of differential forms is awesome, because with some minimal assumptions, they say that there's essentially one way to write down the theory of electromagnetism -- and it turns out to be the right way. Similarly, it looks like there's little promise in applying computability theory to physics, because it is grounded in what happens "at infinity" (and hence does not lend itself to predicting anything in our inherently finite experiments), but real promise in applying information theory and computational complexity theory, which can tell us about asymptotics. So that was why my first reaction is that Wolfram's exceedingly general language wouldn't be very helpful.
However, attitudes can and have changed. If Wolfram and co. come up with a sharp success, where they derive something important without directly putting what they want to get into their starting assumptions, people would pay attention. That's precisely why, e.g. special and general relativity, quantum field theory and string theory are so important today. They all started this way.
Wolfram's press release focused method of advancing his "scientific advances" is so off putting, and highly suspicious that it is more hype that really something new.
Can anyone think of someone???
I actually find his brother Bret to be the opposite in his manner, far more measured and comprehensible: though he'll occasionally forget that you might not know a particular term of art (telomeres, extended phenotype), his ideas are more narrowly scoped to genetic selection pressures and game theory, and a little easier to parse. (His experience is primarily as an educator, which Eric's is not.) Bret and his wife have been doing an educational series on COVID-19, which is quite accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-W9O7qhstY&list=PLjQ2gC-5yH...
His stuff just amounts to large claims and a lot of fiddling around. Its certainly possible that something could come out of it (I mean the idea "physics is just some rules" is vacuously true) but I don't see in any of the work surrounding his ideas any true attempt to get to the bottom of things by trying very hard to understand basic ideas like locality and unitarity and how they must be true or may be violated by physical models which are deeper than the ones we have.
If you want to see that kind of actual hard scientific work, see Nima Arkani Hamad or Gerard 't Hooft.
I, personally, was a bad researcher, which is why I couldn't cut it as an academic. What made me bad was that I got lost in fiddling around rather than trying to hit the most incisive questions in the most useful ways. I see a lot of that in Wolfram.
He's genuinely smart and genuinely looking into an underexplored branch of theory with tons of upside potential, but he also does... this sort of thing, all the time.
For an example of similar quackery from quantitative finance, Espen Haug's ideas are funner:
> And for example my book A New Kind of Science is about this whole phenomenon and why it’s so important for science and beyond.
Right...
It smells like bullshit but people seem to gobble it up and call him a genius, for what? He hasn't published, there's no complete explanation it's just endless front-matter for never-completely explained "geometric unity." If you've ever heard of the internet scammer Ty Lopez... that's what this guy sounds like but for physics instead of self-help.
At least Wolfram has something to show.
It seems to me he's just exploring ideas in the open. That's great. I don't see the problem.
Millionaires with connections.
Let's not pretend there is necessarily any more merit to their theories than that of any unconnected obscure crank or even intelligent outsiders.
They aren't getting publicity on the strength of their ideas (even if there is something to them).
His recent campaign was for his brother who he feels was badly mistreated by a Nobel laureate who he alleges failed to credit him for important related work.
You can hear the latter case on a recent edition of his podcast, The Portal.
At the same time, turning boring results into something fit for publishing can be very time consuming - more than the research itself, and at the opportunity cost of attacking juicier problems.
So if your goal is to utterly revolutionize a field, and you are very confident in your abilities to do so, it’s not the worst strategy in the world to just chase the ideas you’re most excited about and forgo the traditional bureaucratic paths.
I don't think Wolfram's work in the physics space on the cellular automata model has met any of these criteria, so it's not surprising he's not getting mainstrean publication traction. His CA model isn't bringing us novel relationships (yet; I hold out hope here), it isn't making it easier to do what we already do, it hasn't yielded any predictions that existing theories don't also yield, and it's certainly not simpler than field theory and relationship formulae that don't assume a CA. Until there's a breakthrough in one of those three categories that can't be done easily with one of the traditional mechanisms, Wolfram's doing the scientific equivalent of translating lingua franca physics into Klingon; not really wasted effort in that it can be valuable to see something from more than one point of view, but not something that anyone's gonna pay him for or devote their precious column-inches to.
>Note: Since 1987, Stephen Wolfram's intellectual efforts have not primarily been reported in academic articles.
Wolfram's narcissism is so extreme it's just comical. When I was really into complexity science and stuff everyone in the field would joke about it, suggesting a drinking game where you take a shot every time Wolfram refers to how he was a gifted child or started studying math in his teens or single-handedly accomplished some amazing feat. The guy toots his own horn like a circus clown.
It's too bad because he actually does have some very interesting ideas and a good skill at explaining things. His narcissism is self-defeating. He needs to just chill out, write like a normal human being, and publish. Maybe he should take up amateur astronomy. Nothing gives perspective more than carefully observing photons older than the human species with your own eyes.
I sometimes recommend A New Kind of Science with a huge caveat. It's a decent compendium of fascinating cellular automata, complexity, and theoretical CS research with some interesting speculation attached, but (1) Wolfram did not invent all this or do all this work himself, and (2) he takes his speculation too far to the point of flirting with crackpottery. If you can read NKS with those caveats in mind, it's worth at least skimming and taking in the interesting bits.
The problem with the CA-based physics approaches are that while you can create CA models that work and are predictive in ways that mimic conventional mathematical models, so far the approach has failed to produce a compelling model with testable predictions that is unique to the approach.
In other words there's no evidence (yet?) that this approach is better than conventional math, and a strong contrary argument in favor of math can be made from the angle that math maps more clearly to the conceptual space. It's possible to read an equation in terms of the concepts it models, assign units to variables that refer to specific forces or properties, etc. I'm not aware of a way to do that with CA. What you get there are weird rules that manifest something that seems to fit existing mathematical models or concrete observations, but those weird rules are "opaque." It's a relative to the opaqueness problem in AI / machine learning.
Lastly though I would add that the fact that you can create compelling CA models of physics at all does perhaps suggest something about reality. Maybe it suggests that reality is or is similar to a CA system under the hood. The fact that quantum comes from "quanta" and "quantized" suggests that things are in fact discrete at some level.
Also, can't we observe photons older than human species with our naked eyes without taking up amateur astronomy?
What a lame idea, truly worthy of a mandarin.
As for "one of the most creative dudes of this century", I am puzzled as to how you reach this conclusion.
He certainly seems to be a very bright and capable person, and deserves recognition as the publisher of Mathematica, but that was released last century; what has he created since then that places him so high in your estimation?
They hate him cause they ain’t him.
I think it’s reasonable to find someone’s work admirable and yet think they have terrible personalities. There is a line of thought were people should be judged by what they create rather than how they behave, but luckily not many subscribe to it. Not even grown-up Linus Torvalds subscribes to it.
-Question has anyone validated and/or disproved his Geometric Rules based approach and NKS Cellular automata against traditional physics models and found predictable conclusions that can be tested via experiment? IE is it really anything other alternative notation/representation system?
It essentially presupposes a computational canvas to the universe,but in what substrate does this computation happen?
Obviously the guy has an ego the size of a black hole (and probably as insecure about it, since the whole website (beautifully produced of course) has no community forum, comment section or space for peer review about the theories he presents..
He really needs to get away from sycophants in his company and engage with outside world. Citing others would help. New perspectives on physics and mathematical descriptions of the universe are welcome and I'm sure there is plenty of insights to be found..who knows exactly, since the investment in learning and understanding his approach requires substantial effort to decode and without prediction . sad to see how little things like a ego of one little man can both be a source of insight and frustration at the same time..
Now this guy is in a very interesting position, as someone who became fixated upon an interesting (?) phenomenon at one point in his life, then spent decades studying it, wrote books and papers about it, designed a fundamental theory basically ex nihilo based on his grand idea about that field (I'm not arguing for/against the theory's veracity here), AND then built a whole toolset around it all to do research, AND wrote books about his research, AND recorded hours of videos, AND now apparently is putting it all online for people to get easy access for free.
He's thought about something, he's worked it and now he's sharing it all. So I'm kind of curious, what more do you want him to do at this point?
1) Conway has obviously been in the news recently (RIP) and there have been quite a few articles talking about his "Game of Life". The fact that complex patterns emerge from three basic rules seems eerily similar to what Wolfram is now describing. Of course, computational power is now to the point where you can run many more games that we could the first time I entered the program into my Z80-based machine.
2) There's also been a lot of discussion the last couple years about whether we're living in a simulation. With Wolfram performing "zillions" of operations, could it be that there's actually someone living inside his computer wondering the same thing? As we progress in our computing ability, could this happen in the future? If we ourselves are living in a simulation, could those simulating us also be living in a simulation? Is it also turtles all the way up?
2) Yep, it will happen in future, but infinity is not possible in simulation.