Hacker News Reader

Comment by brutusborn | Hacker News Reader

Maybe someone can explain this to me: I (naively) interpret Wolframs theories as trying to generate the observed continuous rules of physics from discrete rules. Thus the value in his approach is that it investigates the possibility that space-time is discrete with the hope that this can reveal something novel about the universe.

Am I misunderstanding something?

I get the feeling that the criticism of his work is because he hasn’t found anything new yet, but that doesn’t mean his computational paradigm isn’t useful and/or simply interesting?

View on HN

I don't think that's right. He's trying to find a computational model that reproduces the rules of physics (including those of quantum mechanics, notably the infamous Born rule with its randomness) from a small set of computational laws. He expects this to also lead to a unification of GR with QM, fixing the biggest hole in physics that has eluded us.

One significant aspect of his program is also to restate all of the laws of physics in terms of computational transformations, instead of differential equations.

Thanks for replying. I’m still a bit confused. Isn’t the main difference between his computational transformations and differential equations that they are discrete?

They are also an entirely different mathematical framework. I'm not even sure if Wolfram's model is discrete (there are continuous models of computation, for example) . But even if they were fully isomorphic, they still represent a different way of thinking about the problem.

Also, I believe he is looking for some base rules that are different from those of QM, thus leading to a theory that is not consistent with QM, but makes similar experimental predictions.

Trying to find…

Yet here’s an entire book…

I haven’t read his books yet, just a few of his longer posts. I don’t have a good background in physics thus why I’m trying to test my understanding.

I think you're broadly right. Wolfram did some theoretical and computational physics at young age (numerical quantum chromodynamics), and in last decades he likes to speculate about how all fundamental physics (3D space, matter and basic physics laws governing them) may come out of some computational process based on a simple rule. His team does computational experiments and visualizations using discrete state machines governed by simple rules. It's looking for a way to invent the Simulation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com