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Comment by forgot_again | Hacker News Reader

>"I think the popular notion that physicists are all in search of the eureka moment in which they will discover the theory of everything is an unfortunate one,” says Katie Mack, a cosmologist at North Carolina State University. “We do want to find better, more complete theories. But the way we go about that is to test and refine our models, look for inconsistencies and incrementally work our way toward better, more complete models.”

And yet Einstein did just that in developing General Relativity, as have many other scientists and thinkers in producing their novel theories or approaches. Yes, GR made falsifiable predictions, but it still represents a paradigm shift, the sort Katie Mack thinks of as "unfortunate".

I am not endorsing Wolfram's work at all. But the idea that science has to progress in a step by step, gradual, collaborative fashion is naive and historically ignorant.

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This is historically not true. Einstein didn't work in complete isolation nor was he the first one to come with a geometric description of gravity. See for instance, [Nordström's theory of gravity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordstr%C3%B6m%27s_theory_of_g...).

This does not intend to take any little bit of merit from Einstein's gigantic contributions, it just come to show the point that Katie Mack is making about the role of community driven refinement. Nordström built on Special Relativity and Einstein's ideas to build a geometric theory of gravity, this one turned out to be incorrect as it didn't predict the correct amount of light bending or perihelion precession. But some slight changes produces the correct one. Nowadays we know that Nordström's theory got only one thing wrong, it's a scalar theory of gravity. Change the spin of the gravitational field to spin 2 and you get Einstein's theory.

I did not claim that Einstein worked in complete isolation. Paradigm shifting work is defined more by its relation to the current mainstream than by whether or not it is worked on in isolation by someone generating all ideas independently. Of course that can't really happen.

Wolfram too is refining the work of others as mentioned in the article.

Respectfully, I think that this is a misunderstanding of the context in which Einstein made his theoretical innovations. He did not do it in a vacuum and he absolutely built upon incremental scientific progress.

The fact that someone else came up with the EFE at essentially the same time as Einstein is telling.

Sure Einstein's work was built upon some previous work, in the same way the Wolfram's work is building on pre-existing work.

This doesn't change the fact that Einstein's approach was a radical departure from the prevailing mainstream. Just as Wolfram's is today.

Trying to classify Einstein as an incrementalist on the basis of his work being built upon previous work would then imply that Wolfram is also an incrementalist because he too is inspired by earlier work in the same vein as his, as the article states. But clearly we're talking about something different here.

Nowhere does Mack say that paradigm shifts, or anything like them, are "unfortunate". To actually believe that she thinks or said that the invention of GR was undesirable is an absurd misinterpretation of what she did say.

It's not naive and historically ignorant, that is how science generally progresses. Paradigm shifts are rare by definition.

Einstein was an obvious outlier, and Wolfram is no Einstein.

Your argument is used by every crackpot to justify their dismissal of the scientific process - because making progress that way is much harder than simply posting their theory on a primadonna blog and demanding the world come to them.

I don't disagree with you that paradigm shifts are rare, but to dismiss then out of hand as simply not being the way we do science is indeed naive.

We need both sorts of thinkers in science: those who want to make the important incremental improvements and those who seek entirely new ways of looking at problems.

Yes we do - but it's important that we don't prioritise the rich, famous, connected businessmen and their internet fanboys trumpeting their vanity projects over the obscure patent clerks (and equivalent) doing the actual hard, brave work of letting their theories speak for themselves.

Of course Wolfram is rich and famous precisely because he has had a lot of good ideas. That's not to be discounted.

It's also important to not immediately discount Wolfram's work simply because he is wealthy and successful and not a formal member of academia. However it seems that some are personally threatened or dislike Wolfram because of who he is which triggers a knee jerk reaction against his work.

I am not an internet fanboy of Wolfram's, I'm only pushing back a bit against the idea that incremental progress upon the scientific mainstream is the only path forward.

No, to be clear, I wasn't including you in the internet fanboys.

I and others are just suggesting Wolfram go through the same process as everybody else instead of using his power to subvert it. That isn't motivated by being threatened, just by a sense of fairness.

As for his good ideas, absolutely - but they are all in business and unconnected to the grand theories he is now promoting - his prior physics experience is junior and long ago, and certainly doesn't warrant special treatment.

> Wolfram is no Einstein.

Einstein was no Einstein either until he became Einstein. You shouldn´t dismiss a paradigm shifting idea just because those are rare. Otherwise, you might miss out on the real one when it comes along. Instead, examine the ideas presented critically and see where they lead you. nothing wrong with that.

As for the crackpot part, science is filled with instances and examples of things that were considered to be crackpot ideas that proved to be not only true, but completely world changing. Have a little bit more humility please rather than being dismissive. Not saying that he´s right but it´s worth listening to the arguments made in case there is some truth to be found in them.

Please don't insult me.

The humility required is from Wolfram, and if he put his arguments in the appropriate forum, they would be listened to, but they would have to fight it out with all the others.

It's certainly not worth listening to every pet theory posted online. They are ten a penny.

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