All: please let's not repeat the usual comments about Wolfram himself. They were a cliché on HN already a decade ago*, and many years before that on the web at large.
It's a good test for the community whether we can focus on what's new/different/interesting here and resist the temptation to noise.
Are there any well respect physicists or research groups independent of Wolfram's group who are taking this seriously or collaborating with Wolfram Physics project?
I would expect something like "an here is Max Planck Institute for Physics collaborating with Wolfram Physics research project on ...". Or something of that nature. At least after all these years.
I used to work close to people who were actually somewhat close to the stuff contained in the papers. The consensus was that there is nothing of substance to engage with.
Edit: When the technical papers appeared in 2020, I personally went through them in some detail. Tl;dr there are almost no novel ideas of substance in there.
Specifically I looked at the "launch documents" provided here:
which, to my knowledge, still are the closest we have to a coherent description of what the grand vision is. Unfortunately I didn't keep my detailed notes, but looking specifically at the relativistic paper, it might appear substantial, but that is because large parts of it review well-known basic results in discrete geometry and causal sets. The actual content is described in a hand wavy way, with little in calculations or rigor (and some elementary mistakes, too).
The issue is that everything that goes beyond standard results is essentially wishful thinking or circular. "If my update rules are such that they produce a causal structure that corresponds to that of a 4-dimensional spacetime, then the wolfram model produces a 4-dimensional spacetime!". This would be interesting if there was any way to characterize the update rules that do so. However, there is not. There is simply the implication that since update rules are very general it must surely be possible to find one that does. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the reader.
A prime example is in Section 3.3:
In all that follows, we shall assume one further condition on the hypergraph update rules, beyond mere causal invariance: namely, “asymptotic dimensionality preservation”. Loosely speaking, this means that the dimensionality of the causal graph show converge to some fixed, finite value as the number of updating events grows arbitrarily large.
However, abstractly defining ensembles of causal graphs that actually produce (at least with high likelihood) the causal graphs of low dimensional manifolds is exactly the core of the issue. If you are able to do that, then the standard results of causal set theory get you the rest of the way. This central difficulty is simply "assumed" to be solved. No further discussion is given on what type of update rules would actually be dimensionality preserving, nor is this identified as a key research question, nor is any evidence or heuristic provided that WOlframs approach has anything new to say on this problem.
As far as I recall the quantum mechanics paper was even worse.
Does anyone understand this theory? When I read through it and listened to his talk, it sounded like a bunch of different ideas stitched together without an underlying explanation.
As a computer scientist who got in touch with quite some theoretical computer science, I find Wolfram's approach appealing. I suppose this approach resonates quite well in CS departments as our minds already know about things like fractals, cellular automata, hypergraphs, etc.
What's not so present in CS (at least where I studied) is philosophy of science. Falsifiability and how theories are created and tested is less grounded in my mind than the topics already mentioned. Though, in physics, this is really important.
Last time I checked, his approach was not able to make real predictions about our world.
So it's not yet a real theory. Of course, this doesn't mean people should stop working on this. It also took humans a long time to develop the mathematics to describe gravity correctly.
Far more interesting, novel, and deserving of more attention is Mills classical model of the atom as electrons in spinning fluid shell orbitspheres. Lots of predictions first made in the 1990s like accelerating expansion of the universe, dark matter, and energy from hydrogen that is 200 times the energy of burning it.
Last time I checked, their claim was that the universe can be modelled as a sufficiently large hypergraph rewriting system, with some initial state, and some set of rules. Which initial state? Which set of rules? Well, uh... some!
It's like saying that the Universe can be modelled as a Turing machine, with sufficiently large memory. (or a bunch of pebbles: https://xkcd.com/505/)
Despite all the negativity towards Wolfram, he’s one of the few out there whom I’m jealous about. He gets to work on his own products, gets time to develop his own theories about important stuff and using his own tools. That’s basically my dream. Who cares if at the end, his findings have “no substance”, he’s living the (nerd) dream.
You might also like meeting Chuck Moore, inventor (or as he says, "discoverer") of Forth. He has done pretty much the same thing. It's a great way to be if you buy into the Forth vision, but for most of us, Forth has too many shortcomings. Roger Levy on Usenet:
> The problem with comparisons with Chuck Moore's philosophy of perfection is that we're trying to do things he has no interest in. We're trying to live in the real world. ... for the time being the rest of the world isn't content to tinker tiny programs into perfection in a cabin in the woods, barely able to articulate their value in a universally cogent way.
This is actually the first Ive heard about any negativity. Are there a couple articles about whats not to like? To be far, I only know about his website and some tool, and that he's intelligent and good at math (which is likely not enough knowledge about that guy), but I always assumed his work was geared towards serious researchers and not really meant for someone like me (little math and physics).
I'm not trying to stir the pot or create infighting on HN, just Ive never heard a bad thing about him until I see the comments here.
In over 20 years since the publication of A New Kind of Science, Wolfram’s approach had not led to a single prediction, neither verified nor falsified, about the natural world. I would very much like to be corrected about this if I’m wrong.
Physicists show that their ideas have substance by solving problems. But Wolfram’s ideas don’t tell us the masses of the elementary particles, the drag of the flow of water through a pipe, or anything else.
This is why the scientific community doesn’t care about this stuff.
The paradigm he's using is too open ended. In quantum mechanics the mathematics is based on Hilbert spaces and unitary evolutions of state vectors. You might ask why this is the case and it is because of conservation principles. Unitary evolution preserves "information" in the state vector throughout its physical evolution. This is not the case for Wolfram's theories. There are no conservation principles in cellular automata other than explicitly forcing the evolution of the automaton to actually preserve the relevant information. More generally, most computational theories of physics are much too lax about the relevant conservation principles and that is why his theory does not predict anything. Turing machines specifically are not required to preserve anything about the initial state and so information can be destroyed and created ex nihilo, violating the main principle of physics which requires that all matter and energy be conserved. The equations have to balance out at the beginning and the end, whatever you start with can not be greater or less than what you end with (at least in physics).
Away from the fact that this is not taken seriously by the physics community. This is the first time we have a chance to use crypto to support a fundamental physics research \s [1]
As if ransomware, money laundering, pump and dump schemes, and tax evasion weren’t enough, now cryptocurrency can be used to support pseudoscience! Will the wonders never cease?
Sorry, I know this is a bit snark-heavy for HN but I can’t help but feel impressed by the way cryptocurrency has somehow succeeded in associating itself with so many ills of modern society.
Before people get too excited about this, note that Wolfram has been on about his own fundamental theory of everything for some time, and the wider physics community does not take it seriously. His book 'A New Kind of Science' has him taking credit for others' discoveries going back to Turing. Here are two recent critiques of this work:
[+] [-] dang|1 year ago|reply
It's a good test for the community whether we can focus on what's new/different/interesting here and resist the temptation to noise.
* (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
[+] [-] Certhas|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rdtsc|1 year ago|reply
I would expect something like "an here is Max Planck Institute for Physics collaborating with Wolfram Physics research project on ...". Or something of that nature. At least after all these years.
[+] [-] Certhas|1 year ago|reply
Edit: When the technical papers appeared in 2020, I personally went through them in some detail. Tl;dr there are almost no novel ideas of substance in there.
Specifically I looked at the "launch documents" provided here:
https://wolframphysics.org/technical-documents/
which, to my knowledge, still are the closest we have to a coherent description of what the grand vision is. Unfortunately I didn't keep my detailed notes, but looking specifically at the relativistic paper, it might appear substantial, but that is because large parts of it review well-known basic results in discrete geometry and causal sets. The actual content is described in a hand wavy way, with little in calculations or rigor (and some elementary mistakes, too).
The issue is that everything that goes beyond standard results is essentially wishful thinking or circular. "If my update rules are such that they produce a causal structure that corresponds to that of a 4-dimensional spacetime, then the wolfram model produces a 4-dimensional spacetime!". This would be interesting if there was any way to characterize the update rules that do so. However, there is not. There is simply the implication that since update rules are very general it must surely be possible to find one that does. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the reader.
A prime example is in Section 3.3:
In all that follows, we shall assume one further condition on the hypergraph update rules, beyond mere causal invariance: namely, “asymptotic dimensionality preservation”. Loosely speaking, this means that the dimensionality of the causal graph show converge to some fixed, finite value as the number of updating events grows arbitrarily large.
However, abstractly defining ensembles of causal graphs that actually produce (at least with high likelihood) the causal graphs of low dimensional manifolds is exactly the core of the issue. If you are able to do that, then the standard results of causal set theory get you the rest of the way. This central difficulty is simply "assumed" to be solved. No further discussion is given on what type of update rules would actually be dimensionality preserving, nor is this identified as a key research question, nor is any evidence or heuristic provided that WOlframs approach has anything new to say on this problem.
As far as I recall the quantum mechanics paper was even worse.
[+] [-] jereees|1 year ago|reply
https://x.com/getjonwithit
[+] [-] shoggouth|1 year ago|reply
[0]: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
[+] [-] cloudking|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] drpossum|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mo_42|1 year ago|reply
What's not so present in CS (at least where I studied) is philosophy of science. Falsifiability and how theories are created and tested is less grounded in my mind than the topics already mentioned. Though, in physics, this is really important.
Last time I checked, his approach was not able to make real predictions about our world. So it's not yet a real theory. Of course, this doesn't mean people should stop working on this. It also took humans a long time to develop the mathematics to describe gravity correctly.
[+] [-] dave333|1 year ago|reply
https://brilliantlightpower.com/wp-content/uploads/theory/Th...
https://brilliantlightpower.com/subject-exciting-news-the-gr...
[+] [-] meindnoch|1 year ago|reply
Last time I checked, their claim was that the universe can be modelled as a sufficiently large hypergraph rewriting system, with some initial state, and some set of rules. Which initial state? Which set of rules? Well, uh... some!
It's like saying that the Universe can be modelled as a Turing machine, with sufficiently large memory. (or a bunch of pebbles: https://xkcd.com/505/)
Are there any new claims from them?
[+] [-] dakiol|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway81523|1 year ago|reply
> The problem with comparisons with Chuck Moore's philosophy of perfection is that we're trying to do things he has no interest in. We're trying to live in the real world. ... for the time being the rest of the world isn't content to tinker tiny programs into perfection in a cabin in the woods, barely able to articulate their value in a universally cogent way.
[+] [-] amelius|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ProAm|1 year ago|reply
I'm not trying to stir the pot or create infighting on HN, just Ive never heard a bad thing about him until I see the comments here.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] leephillips|1 year ago|reply
Physicists show that their ideas have substance by solving problems. But Wolfram’s ideas don’t tell us the masses of the elementary particles, the drag of the flow of water through a pipe, or anything else.
This is why the scientific community doesn’t care about this stuff.
[+] [-] mathinaly|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] elashri|1 year ago|reply
[1] https://www.wolframphysics.org/membership/
[+] [-] sva_|1 year ago|reply
> One-time $100 donation
This actually had me laugh out loud. I must've been a poor kid
[+] [-] stouset|1 year ago|reply
Sorry, I know this is a bit snark-heavy for HN but I can’t help but feel impressed by the way cryptocurrency has somehow succeeded in associating itself with so many ills of modern society.
[+] [-] jobtemp|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fredgrott|1 year ago|reply
And, yes it takes a while to digest...you have to invest some time in reading both authors series on the subject...but its well worth the read.
[+] [-] limit499karma|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] qnleigh|1 year ago|reply
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic...
https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089
[+] [-] jpmattia|1 year ago|reply
> I thank Stephen Wolfram for an enjoyable conversation about this review;
[+] [-] Certhas|1 year ago|reply
http://www.bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/