[syats]

Let us concede that in the last 20 years, the number of mentions of "I" in his writing has decreased, and there are more mentions of "We".

As much as a cellular automata, and computation in general, fan as I am, and after having read a fair amount of his work... I am still not convinced that Wolfram is not just a rich crack pot.

[m12k]

As rich eccentrics go, I much prefer the ones trying to advance science (like Wolfram) or medicine (like Gates) to the ones just building more superyachts and lobbying corrupt politicians.

I don't really understand the animosity toward Stephen Wolfram on HN - has he done something evil or been super rude to someone? Maybe he has a big ego, but I think that's probably true of a lot of - if not most - of the rich and/or influential people that are discussed on here, whether Bezos, Gates, Jobs, Musk or Stallman. It takes a certain hubris to think you can make a dent in the universe. Why is that if your hubris is to believe you can make a billion dollar startup, HN is all "you go girl!" but if someone wants to do theoretical physics, they really need to check their ego?

I don't know if cellular automata as a foundation of physics will turn out to be a revolution or a dud. I do know that we've been looking for a unified theory of quantum gravity for many decades to no avail. If somebody is motivated to come at the thing from a new perspective, then more power to them. Are they likely to succeed? Of course not, statistically the vast majority of theories don't. But just working to provide new perspectives is a worthwhile goal, and I'm glad he's working on it.

[throwaway81523]

The issue is he makes a bunch of apparently empty claims about his hypergraph stuff being related to physics. The pictures are pretty and the hypergraph stuff is perhaps interesting in its own right, but with all the hand waving about QM and GR, I looked pretty hard a couple of years ago and couldn't find any explanation of the most familiar QM phenomena like the double slit experiment. It's almost like free association. I'd like to see this new theory solve one problem, and by that I don't mean an open research problem. I mean pick any homework problem from an introductory QM course and apply this stuff to it. As Feynman used to say, you have to get the numbers out. As far as I can tell, that hasn't happened.

[dTal]

> I don't really understand the animosity toward Stephen Wolfram on HN - has he done something evil or been super rude to someone?

He's super rude to pretty much the entire scientific community, by essentially pretending to have invented cellular automata and ignoring everyone else's contributions - even to the point of suppressing them by wielding the legal axe of copyright law:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30941559

[tsimionescu]

To me that reads mostly like the royal "we", as in "We, Stephen Wolfram". Especially when saying things like "Wolfram Research has been geared towards making things we think up into products".

[evilotto]

He does have some genuinely good ideas. But they're not reinventing every field of science, technology, and knowledge every few months as his writing would have you believe.

So, smarter than the average crackpot. But not "not a crackpot".

[systemvoltage]

Let him do his thing, he supports many employees for a living, and does meaningful work occassionally. There are many people that are far more problematic for the society than Mr. Wolfram. He hasn't done any harm to anyone. Let him chill in peace.

[ginnungagap]

> He hasn't done any harm to anyone.

Reading posts from former employees and plagiarism accusations (look up Matthew Cook) suggests otherwise.

I remember this being discussed on HN before as well, even though the search function is not bringing up anything.

[recuter]

And what is wrong with that? Most of the internet is filled with poor crack pots, some of them are even here amongst us.

I'd rather be a rich dick than a poor schmuck. Pee into the wind Sir Wolfram, godspeed! Doesn't seem super different to how most grant money is awarded.

[hyperpallium2]

Is he a genius or a crackpot? Yes.