Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics

[avalys]

Oh, I didn’t check the URL first.

“Look, a simple rule made this picture! It looks very complicated. The universe is also very complicated. Therefore I’ve discovered the theory of everything. Look, this one looks like a tree! I am so great. Here is a proof of how great I am, written in my proprietary software.”

Expand that to 10,000 pages and that’s what Wolfram has been up to.

[ogogmad]

There's a rule on this website against shallow dismissals. Somehow, this rule gets forgotten whenever something by Wolfram gets posted.

[a9h74j]

That loosely characterizes my reaction to his "New Science" tomb however many years ago.

Succinctly, I took the celluar automaton stuff to be simulating nonconservative diffusion.

That said, my guess is that the current combinatorial stuff either should not or cannot be so easily dismissed.

[Koshkin]

I wish somebody on here could write a meaningful summary of this. I refuse to believe that Wolfram is a crank as some commenters seem to imply.

[psyc]

First, I recommend skipping this post and proceeding directly to:

https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/

This post is almost pure unrelenting direct-marketing drivel, minus the call-to-action for your credit card at the end. All tell, no show. Instead of describing his theory, he describes the various exciting contortions that his face went through when he thought of it.

It is very, very hard to tell whether there is anything here. It looks as if he has taken a data structure so basic and flexible that it can represent anything you could ever think of, and then found to nobody's surprise but his own that it can represent all of known physics. Well, some other things that can represent all of known physics include: The alphabet? Math notation? Set Theory?

But I repeat: It is very, very hard to tell whether there is anything here. It is an avalanche of pictures of complicated-looking graphs, and breathless exposition that I fear does radiate crankiness. It appears to be about a million times more complicated than the physics we already have. If it isn't a million times more complicated, then he has done the worst job he could possible do of communicating it.

A relevant question to ask might be: What other leading theoretical physicists consider this a promising line of inquiry?

[jakedata]

1. Pretty 2. He took quite a while to get around to fractals 3. It looks like he created several universes in which ABBA exists in some form! 4. Wolfram gets high on his own supply

[ThereIsNoWorry]

It seems to me he's doing some kind of combinatorial enumeration and using biases to find related patterns in Math and Physics in some kind of iterative bottom up approach?

[yetihehe]

Yeah, IMHO apart from using combinatorial enumeration, that's how most of progress in physics happens. You start with an idea and see to what it applies. When you search for a theory of everything, you try to apply it to everything you know. If it applies to many different things, you may be on the right track.

[ogogmad]

Combinatorial enumeration might work. Isn't Deep Learning a spectacular victory of dumb brute force (in the form of Gradient Descent and overparameterisation) over elegant theory? Seemingly if you do a brute-force search to solve a problem, the number of possibilities you need to look through should be overwhelming, but a lot the time this isn't the case.

[Edit] The origin story of DL is also full of shallow dismissals, for perhaps not dissimilar reasons to the ones you're seeing here.

[qorrect]

Can someone tell me before I read all this if it's a practical joke.

[mjholliday]

It's a joke, but Stephen Wolfram doesn't realize it.

[domenkozar]

Can we wait with the nukes for a few months?

I really want to know how the universe works before we go back to sticks and stones.

[Rerarom]

(2020)

[ffhhj]

Also the Riemann hypothesis was solved in 2018, so they claim: https://www.businessinsider.com/riemann-hypothesis-solved-by...