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Normally I skip articles by Wolfram because all he does is spout about how good Mathematica is. But filter out the free advertising for Mathematica and you hav
by olympus 11y ago
Normally I skip articles by Wolfram because all he does is spout about how good Mathematica is. But filter out the free advertising for Mathematica and you have a pretty decent article that starts out discussing gravitational waves and continues on to some interesting coverage on some neat results about gravity. I'm not sure we'll be creating a stable lattice of bodies all orbiting each other any time soon, but it was fun to read about. If you are moderately talented at math/physics you can probably understand most of this article. No PhD required, and the animations are fairly informative.
- JackFr 11y agoSame feeling. Apart from the occasional Wolframism ("my Rule 30"), this is a really informative read.
- brudgers 11y agoMy father was a scientist by profession. I remember how much he talked about SMP when his branch of NRL got it. Later he learned a bit of Mathematica. Anecdote is not data, but when Wolfram claims that scientists use Wolfram Research's products to investigate relativity, I tend to believe him. Not just because it conforms to my experience but because he is in a position to know. I have found that pretty much all of what Wolfram writes is closer to this article than the popular internet opinion. I suspect that that's because his tools scratch his intellectual curiosity...they exist so that he can start with the sort of math that starts this article and go from there...or write a book like A New Kind of Science.
- chm 11y agoSome universities pay for a Mathematica site license. I have used the software since version 6. It's really good for prototyping (my whole MSc was done in Mathematica), but the biggest problem for me is that code re-use is a total mess. It's easier to teach someone to write some Python and use a Git GUI than it is to teach a new student (who is not a programmer) how to properly use Mathematica with version control. Notebooks are, by design, made to be interactive and promote an incremental, playful discovery process. That is intuitive and students pick it up very quickly. This means that code is passed around as (in my experience) bloated, poorly written, poorly documented and inefficient (no FP, all imperative) notebooks containing multiple "orphan" sections which were just quick hacks to try and see if something worked. Of course you can learn to write packages and good documentation which integrates flawlessly in the documentation center, but that takes time and effort most scientists would not be willing to give.
- davesque 11y agoI agree. I actually love Mathematica and the Wolfram Language but its main problem is the lack of any convenient ways to package it, track it in git, edit it in vim, etc. I spent some time investigating how to do that but it all just seemed really opaque and complicated. That's one of the risks of using proprietary software, I suppose.
- chm 11y agoYou can do that with packages but not (at least not easily and conveniently) with notebooks. So basically your functions can reside in a package, but your computation has to reside inside notebooks. It is possible to write notebooks directly in a text editor and then have them run. That just gave me an idea for a weekend project...
- davesque 11y agoI'm sure it's possible, but is it straight-forward how you're supposed to do this properly? And is there any way to access the Wolfram kernel from the command-line (like a python executable)? Update: I guess I owe the Wolfram Language another look.
- chm 11y agoYes, you can use the kernel from the command line: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/UsingATextBasedInterface.html https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/UsingATextBa... https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/WolframLanguageScripts.html https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/WolframLangu...
- davesque 11y agoAhh, well alright then :). Thx for the info.
- heavenlyhash 11y ago
- eru 11y agoIndeed. But the book was nothing to write home about.
- brudgers 11y agoTo a first approximation, nobody writes home about science books. These days everything is a juried paper.
- eru 11y agoOh, the problem is that Wolfram portraits his book as the ultimate breakthrough, even though at bests its an entertaining pop-sci tome. See http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089 http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089 Also funny, from the same author: > “The impact of NKS on all the areas of computer science and physics I’m familiar with has been basically zero,” he says. “As far as I can tell, the main impact is that people now sometimes use the adjective ‘Wolframian’ to describe breathtaking claims for the trivial or well-known.” [Martin] Davis offers a sunnier take: “The book has a lot of beautiful pictures.”
- brudgers 11y agoWhen the book was finally published, demand was low, with an initial print run of 400 failing to sell out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_revolutionibus_orbium_coelestium#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_revolutionibus_orbium_coele...
- eru 11y agoSorry, I don't understand. What's your point?
- peter303 11y agoHe also harps on how Cellular Automata will replace (or complement) a lot differential equation based physics, but I havent seen many significant exampled. Hew wrote a whole book on that and refers to it a couple of times in this blog.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoI think that a cellular automata can replace any differential equation. That doesn't necessarily make it a more correct (or more useful!) way to look at things.
- zardo 11y agoThe real challenge is that you can't easily predict what phenomena will be caused by what rules, and you can't easily derrive what rules will cause whatever phenomena you are interested in.
- 21 11y agoHe has another interesting article in which he speculates how spacetime might emerge from connected nodes (graphs). http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/what-is-spacetime-really/ http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/what-is-spacetime-rea...