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The Wolfram Physics Project

• teh_g 6y ago
  The phrase 'a new kind of science' is a huge red flag, but apart from this I don't think I can evaluate what I'm reading. Does the article make any sense? Does it at least hint at a useful direction? Or is this a case of someone holding a hammer (the language) and seeing everything as a nail (how the universe works)?
  • MengerSponge 6y ago
    It doesn't pass the smell test. I'll be very diplomatic and say this to our high school and undergrad readers: Mathematica is a lovely program, but working for this man on this project will not do good things for your scientific career. Among the many many many red flags, Wolfram claims to have discovered that complexity can emerge from simple rules in the early 80's. This is a full decade after P. W. Anderson's seminal paper [More is Different](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393). In fact, if you haven't RTFA yet, save your time and just read the original, rigorous, less self-aggrandizing paper: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393
    • seph-reed 6y ago
      > Among the many many many red flags, Wolfram claims to have discovered that complexity can emerge from simple rules in the early 80's Total red flag. His obsession with this - though - does not seem ill placed. As far as smell tests go, I think this thread is worth pulling.
    • mdonahoe 6y ago
      I can’t seem to access more than the cover page of that paper. Do I need a journal membership?
      • mdonahoe 6y ago
        Found a pdf linked from his Wikipedia page http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72mo... Though I must admit I don’t really understand it. I was expecting automata to be referenced somewhere. I enjoyed A New Kind of Science, though I feel like it would have been a much shorter book if Wolfram included less self-aggrandizing.
        • MengerSponge 6y ago
          It's the paper that established "emergent phenomena" as an interesting and viable field of inquiry. When you understand it, it changes the way you think about the world. It's more fundamental than automata papers, so of course it doesn't address automata, but automata papers should reference it. "A New Kind of Science proposed ideas that were not new, were not kind, and were not science. Discuss."
    • Tistron 6y ago
      I am also put off by his self-obsession, but it is also true that I discovered how complexity can emerge from simple rules in the 90's. Like wolfram, I was not first, but I did discover it.
• Zhyl 6y ago
  Stephen Wolfram is well known in the industry as being a pompous, self-indulgent man. There was an old joke I heard which went: > Q: How do you know if Stephen Wolfram invented something? > A: He'll tell you. I saw a TED talk by Conrad Wolfram about using Mathematica as an educational tool [1]. I went to one of my tutorials and tried to discuss it with the Professor (we were encouraged to bring up basically anything we'd seen or encountered in our first few weeks of uni). His response was "I don't think we need to worry about what Conrad Wolfram is saying." By all accounts, Stephen and Conrad Wolfram are clever men. It is without a doubt that Mathematica is an extraordinary piece of software. Many people here will have benefitted from Wolfram Alpha and will have used Mathematica either in an academic context or in an engineering context. Stephen Wolfram, however, is not Christ, even though he likes to think so. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60OVlfAUPJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60OVlfAUPJg
  • tannhauser23 6y ago
    That may be true, but science is full of pompous, self-indulgent men who make brilliant discoveries. Of course, science is also littered with cranks who make grandiose claims of discovery - especially in physics. Curious to hear what people who actually study this stuff think about this supposedly discovery.
    • JackFr 6y ago
      The thing is, Wolfram earned his stripes as a very competent physics prodigy, and is clearly very, very smart. But as far as I can tell, no one studies this stuff except him and hist acolytes and I think few established physicists would be inclined too, so it's very difficult to evaluate his ideas. Is he a crank? For a classic definition of crank, no. Does this work represent a clearer understanding of physics than we had prior, or is it an interesting diversion? Harder question, but one has to assume, probably diversion. On the other hand if time travel or teleportation IS ever invented, my money is that it will be Wolfram.
      • Y_Y 6y ago
        He was smart enough to package up a Lisp computer algebra system (CAS) and sell it all over the place.
• caleb-allen 6y ago
  If I have to read through so much of the article context disguised as bragging without anything resembling something new then maybe this Fundamental Theory is less important than Stephen Wolfram showing how many Important Things he's done
  • JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
    Oh you don’t remember when Einstein published his papers how he vamped for almost all of it like a Mommy blogger or a recipe spamsite?
    • zarmin 6y ago
      IIRC, all of Einstein's papers were just a not-so-subtle advertisement for gaia.com
  • JackFr 6y ago
    That is the reason we love Stephen Wolfram.
    • jjoonathan 6y ago
      Stephen Wolfram: his physics might be completely unproven, but his blog posts stand as conclusive evidence that shameless self-promotion has no upper bound.
      • agumonkey 6y ago
        WOLFRM > TREE ?
    • MengerSponge 6y ago
      We still don't know what will achieve self-awareness first: Mathematica or Stephen Wolfram
  • gunshai 6y ago
    Through the grape vine I've heard this is "very much like Stephen Wolfram"
• ddevault 6y ago
  Wow, this is... the worst. This is the most egregious clickbait I've seen on HN in a long time.
  • jjoonathan 6y ago
    That's Stephen Wolfram for you. He's genuinely smart and genuinely looking into an underexplored branch of theory with tons of upside potential, but he also does... this sort of thing, all the time.
• floatingatoll 6y ago
  Wolfram’s header image apart from the article is available in light and dark variants that can be pinch-zoomed more easily: http://www.wolframphysics.org/visual-summary/ http://www.wolframphysics.org/visual-summary/ Based on this image alone, having not yet read the article, it looks like he’s taken his prior insights on cellular automata (Conway’s Game type stuff) and advanced them forward to quarks and Feynman diagrams. I typically have a very rough time with Wolfram’s writing but the image is, at least, simple enough to follow. “What are the rules for particle timeflows?” is certainly a question that’s interesting though my phrasing is probably terrible. EDIT: Yup, it’s definitely quarks X cellular automata. Clearly an extension of previous Wolfram work, still just as enthusiastic / savior-ish as ever. I hope it pans out somehow in pragmatic real world outcomes someday. Bonus link to diagram showing a fate decision tree behaving like a Conway glider: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2020/04/0409img126.png https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2020/04/040...
  • gunshai 6y ago
    What does that visual summary even communicate?
    • steve76 6y ago
      One thing makes two leads to one thing making another thing pushing back on one thing making another thing. Group them together. Allow groups to connect back to themselves. Run them in very high numbers. Try to find shortcuts. Relate shortcuts to real world.
    • floatingatoll 6y ago
      “What if the causality that led to the universe can be modeled using a form of Conway’s Game of Life automata built on Feynman diagrams?” Note that I have no idea if Wolfram is right or not, but I’m glad I tried and failed to read New Kind of Science years ago. The mindset/approach were worth it and make it possible to follow along with today’s post.
• verytrivial 6y ago
  I can't tell if this is real or the output of a neural network trained on Mr Wolfram's corpus of bloviation.
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• zerobits 6y ago
  Despite 80% of comments focusing on Wolfram's pompousness, this is an interesting expansion of cellular automata to arbitrary dimensions. Coincidental timing of publication - one day after John Conway's passing. We may be in a n-dimensional Game of Life after all.
  • zwaps 6y ago
    Interestingly this mirrors other disciplines. Consider for example Schelling's model of segregation in social science, which is (probably not by accident) very similar to cellular automata. Just a few years laters, people quickly translated this to graphs - a network. The spacial interpretation aside, the idea surely should hold for higher dimensional social relations. And that's where we reach and interesting point that Wolfram writes about: These system are useful, as long as we can calculate or derive a state. If all we can do is simulate it, then it's much less useful. And indeed, creating such models is the true "art". So while the "idea" of using relations and hypergraphs lays a foundation that I am sympathetic to, I also feel like the things "on the to do list" are, indeed, the meat of the issue.
• smoyer 6y ago
  I am not a physicist but as a layman there are two interesting things that my mind (which admittedly finds connections in things that others don't) thought of while reading the article: 1) Conway has obviously been in the news recently (RIP) and there have been quite a few articles talking about his "Game of Life". The fact that complex patterns emerge from three basic rules seems eerily similar to what Wolfram is now describing. Of course, computational power is now to the point where you can run many more games that we could the first time I entered the program into my Z80-based machine. 2) There's also been a lot of discussion the last couple years about whether we're living in a simulation. With Wolfram performing "zillions" of operations, could it be that there's actually someone living inside his computer wondering the same thing? As we progress in our computing ability, could this happen in the future? If we ourselves are living in a simulation, could those simulating us also be living in a simulation? Is it also turtles all the way up?
  • brutt 6y ago
    1) Yep. Universe is built on few very simple principles, which can be used to implement emulation: dimensions, energy/force, inertia/mass, time. (And infinity). 2) Yep, it will happen in future, but infinity is not possible in simulation.
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• aivosha 6y ago
  I wonder if this is in response to Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity presentation he did on April 1st. Yesterday, on Lex Fridman's podcast, he mentioned how since he revealed his theory there wasnt any feedback from scientific community. BTW, highly recommend watching Eric's Portal.
  • meowface 6y ago
    I would love to see thorough, detailed analysis and critique of Weinstein's Geometric Unity theory and the latest version of Wolfram's cellular automata-like theory of reality. (Weinstein still needs to put up a formal paper, though.) At the time of writing this comment, the majority of responses here are just calling the guy a pompous crank, rather than pointing out specific issues with the central claims of the proposal. Funny that this is on the website created by the guy who proposed the Hierarchy of Disagreement [0]. There are many comments with valid critiques, but so far there are more of the other kind. Yeah, Wolfram and Weinstein have some eccentricities, and the intro section to this is kind of unnecessary and grating and could probably be cut out, but they're also very intelligent people who have discovered and created things which are both "new and true" (and/or new and useful) rather than merely "true or new, mutually exclusively" as people like to snidely parrot. I'm not saying this theory or Weinstein's theory aren't necessarily irreparably riddled with holes. Just that the nature of the criticism often seems bizarre, poor quality, and directed at their personalities rather than their content, like in this comment section. It'd be much more refreshing to see it be criticized on its merits rather than its tone or the personality traits of its author. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_D...
• heavyarms 6y ago
  Anybody who has coded Game of Life can draw a parallel to this. Simple rules can lead to arbitrarily complex systems. I'm all on board with this concept. Graph theory is amazing and useful in many ways we don't understand yet. I'm all on board with this concept as well. But a graph has nodes and edges. Nodes, in this case, can be particles.. I guess? But what are the edges? When a "simple rule" is applied to a collection of particles, what is the force that connects them after the interaction? I read some of the material in detail and skimmed some of the rest, but there was a lot of setup and cool graph visualizations and not a lot speaking to this core question. Disclaimer: I'm not a theoretical physicist but I have read "Quantum Physics for Babies" at least 50 times.
  • MengerSponge 6y ago
    Yep. A whole lot of this is "Automata are relevant! I'm relevant!" and some hand-waving and "Doesn't this loooook like a mesh? See! We made space-time!" Save your time, just read More is Different: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393
    • tome 6y ago
      I've just read it based on your recommendation. I enjoyed it but I don't find that it obviates Wolfram's work, or even overlaps with it much at all (and I'm no big Wolfram fan).
    • jonathan_gorard 6y ago
      With respect, I don't think that our derivation of the conformal structure of spacetime, or of the Einstein field equations in the continuum limit of infinite causal graphs, is "hand-waving". See, for instance: https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some-relativistic-and-gravitational-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
  • m12k 6y ago
    Still not done reading, but in this representation, particles are stable shapes in the successive steps of the hypergraph (e.g. like gliders and other stable shapes in Game of Life).
• covidacct 6y ago
  After a few iterations, I think I understand the point of this piece. It was a bit difficult to hone in on, though. The article suggests that working out the theory of something like rule production systems, and then figuring out how that theory relates to existing insights from physics, is the best path toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics. My primary source of skepticism stems from the fact that the theory of rule production systems is not exactly a new area of study. It's been well-developed at various points in time and from various perspectives by the theoretical CS, programming language theory, automated theorem proving, and mathematical logic communities. That theory addresses most of Stephen's "big difficult questions" about the non-physics side of things. For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a very old and extremely well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory. I sympathize with Stephen. In fact, he sounds a bit like I did early in my scientific career. Unfortunately, though, I just don't see how these old well-understood ideas from computer science are going to result in a new fundamental theory of physics.
  • philipov 6y ago
    Have ideas from computer science had significant reach inside theoretical physics before? It seems like physics has only recently discovered its love-affair with information theory, but information theory had existed for a long time before quantum information theory became a hot area of study. Maybe what's new here are not the ideas themselves, but bringing them into an area of study that hasn't payed attention to them before.
    • covidacct 6y ago
      Maybe. I doubt it, though. There has always been substantial cross-talk between CS/information theory and Physics. Even through the 1990s it was difficult to be a computer scientist without eventually coming into contact with a non-trivial number of physicists. Especially in industrial research labs. Bell Labs, PARC, and IBM Research were full of physicists. Bell Labs and PARC are dead, but AFAIK IBM Research still has a bunch of physicists and the newer kids on the block (Google Research, FAIR, Deepmind, Microsoft Research, Intel, AMD) also have a share of physicists. Besides, Stephen's approach here is to ignore 15-20 years of research from various CS sub-communities; his best case scenario is spending a decade reinventing that wheel. The problem with cross-talk that isn't "humble on both sides" is that it's either a) a waste of time because one side's ideas aren't that important, or else b) a waste of time because one side has to reinvent the other wise.
• Ono-Sendai 6y ago
  Only skim-read the article. What seems to be lacking are any testable predictions of this theory, or something like derivations of existing measured constants that one would think you would get from a fundamental theory of physics.
• podgaj 6y ago
  Wow, Stephen Wolfram has just rediscovers Daoism...
• bhouston 6y ago
  It would be nice that instead of a press release and a long diatribe with fancy graphics, he took the boring but hard step of publishing a paper that advances the field and getting accolades from fellow physicists who agree with him. Wolfram's press release focused method of advancing his "scientific advances" is so off putting, and highly suspicious that it is more hype that really something new.
• hprotagonist 6y ago
  OK, so how does it all work? I’ve written a 448-page technical exposition (yes, I’ve been busy the past few months!). Another member of our team (Jonathan Gorard) has written two 60-page technical papers. And there’s other material available at the project website. But here I’m going to give a fairly non-technical summary of some of the high points. I wonder if this hapless postdoc-equivalent is going to get sued, too! https://www.nature.com/articles/417216a https://www.nature.com/articles/417216a https://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2002-July/005692.html https://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2002-July/005692.html
  • jonathan_gorard 6y ago
    I sure hope not ;)
• nathan_compton 6y ago
  What Wolfram is saying, and has always said, is vacuous in the extreme. There is more new science in 't Hooft's book about Quantum Mechanics as Cellular Automata than in all of A New Kind of Science. His stuff just amounts to large claims and a lot of fiddling around. Its certainly possible that something could come out of it (I mean the idea "physics is just some rules" is vacuously true) but I don't see in any of the work surrounding his ideas any true attempt to get to the bottom of things by trying very hard to understand basic ideas like locality and unitarity and how they must be true or may be violated by physical models which are deeper than the ones we have. If you want to see that kind of actual hard scientific work, see Nima Arkani Hamad or Gerard 't Hooft. I, personally, was a bad researcher, which is why I couldn't cut it as an academic. What made me bad was that I got lost in fiddling around rather than trying to hit the most incisive questions in the most useful ways. I see a lot of that in Wolfram.
• aaron-santos 6y ago
  Graph grammars are Turing complete so I don't see why they couldn't express the fundamental theory of physics, but it seems like a weird way of going about the problem.
  • sriram_malhar 6y ago
    A turing machine cannot produce randomness, non-determinism.
    • jdjrirkfkfk 6y ago
      We dont know if physical randomness truly is so. It could be pseudo random with a seed (superdeterminism)
      • gexaha 6y ago
        how about Conway-Kochen's Free Will Theorem? is it compatible with superdeterminism?
        • wolfgke 6y ago
          If you are interested in such topics, read 't Hooft, Gerard: The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41285-6 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41285-6 Reference number 23.
        • skosch 6y ago
          Yes. Superdeterminism does away with the observer as a separate thing, so the question of free will doesn't even come up. Everything is just one evolving system.
    • kleer001 6y ago
      No, but it can produce something that's unpredictable from the original code. And that's spitting distance from random.
• gfodor 6y ago
  I'll just say it, I love Stephen Wolfram. The fact he gets under so many peoples' skins, and yet keeps leading teams producing amazing stuff (Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language, etc) gets an A+ in my book. Anyone who puts so much energy into this stuff, which such ego, obviously wants to contribute in a real and meaningful way to ensure his own understanding and his legacy. A personality flaw? Sure. But we've seen bigger assholes make huge dents in the universe - physics is long overdue for someone to shake things up. From my vantage point, as a laymen, theoretical physics is dead, and its a shame. It may take someone like Wolfram to do it - it probably takes flipping the bird to peer review at this point to get widespread dissemination of radical takes on theoretical physics. And it certainly seems like a lot of radical takes will be necessary for us to actually make progress. So, hats off. Even if this isn't the Big Idea, maybe it'll end up sparking an idea in someone else's head down the road that gets us there.
  • DubiousPusher 6y ago
    > theoretical physics is dead I'm genuinely not sure why you believe this especially as we live in an era when theoretical physics and experimental physics are becoming so entwined and the product is a fairly successful testing of our models of physics.
    • gfodor 6y ago
      I believe it because it seems to be the consensus I gather whenever I read articles about theoretical physics' hunt for the unified theory. I'm talking about that problem specifically. The search for the unified theory sounds basically dead, and we have a generation of physicists who have spent their careers going down dead ends. The meme seems to be for the field to move past it and focus on more "productive" areas of physics that can have practical use. I can only gather this from 2nd hand accounts in pop-sci articles and mainstream physics books, but the lack of falsifiability and experimentalism for these things, combined with a large surface area of failed attempts, seems to have left physics in a rut.
      • codethief 6y ago
• lalaithion 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure that this would violate Bell's theorem, and I'd love an explanation of why it wouldn't. It looks to me like a system of local, hidden variables, unless there's some sense in which changes in the hypergraph can propagate faster than the speed of light.
  • aaron-santos 6y ago
    It doesn't rule out superdeterminism.
  • jonathan_gorard 6y ago
    We can prove violation of the CHSH inequality, and hence compatibility with Bell's theorem, as a natural consequence of our formalism. See, for instance: https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some-quantum-mechanical-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so... Or, for a less technical version of the basic idea: https://www.wolframphysics.org/questions/quantum-mechanics/how-can-your-models-be-consistent-with-bells-theorem/ https://www.wolframphysics.org/questions/quantum-mechanics/h...
  • leni536 6y ago
    It doesn't look like a local theory at all.
  • AgentME 6y ago
    I'm only halfway through the page, but so far it looks like it's describing a system that's compatible with the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and MWI is local without violating Bell's theorem.
  • nmaley 6y ago
    The theory needs a lot of development, so it would be hard to say whether it could or could not comply with Bells theorem. But since it is Turing complete presumably there is some variant of the theory which complies with Bell's theorem. I find it interesting that under this theory regions of space and properties of objects are emergent phenomena. I suspect that under some variants of the theory, properties of objects could act as if they are both random and non local.
• prideout 6y ago
  Given his passion for cellular automata and the timing of his post, it would have been nice if Wolfram had at least mentioned the late great Conway and his recent passing.
• Koshkin 6y ago
  "A New Kind of Physics"? > And for example my book A New Kind of Science is about this whole phenomenon and why it’s so important for science and beyond. Right...
• jordanpg 6y ago
  What this project needs is someone at the center of it. A visionary. A leader. A genius. A prolix author. Can anyone think of someone???
  • notfromhere 6y ago
    I don’t know who that should be, I know who it shouldn’t.
  • zaptheimpaler 6y ago
    There can be only one..
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  • saadalem 6y ago
    Eric weinstein ?
    • lliamander 6y ago
      I'd like to see that. Although honestly I find him and his brother to both be frustratingly vague and abstract at times.
      • diegoperini 6y ago
        Bret helps much more to his listeners than his brother imo.
      • lukifer 6y ago
        At times, Eric has quite the way with words; yet on Lex Fridman's podcast, he really struggled to communicate Geometric Unity in a way that's even slightly accessible to a layperson, despite Lex's patient prodding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIAZJNe7YtE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIAZJNe7YtE I actually find his brother Bret to be the opposite in his manner, far more measured and comprehensible: though he'll occasionally forget that you might not know a particular term of art (telomeres, extended phenotype), his ideas are more narrowly scoped to genetic selection pressures and game theory, and a little easier to parse. (His experience is primarily as an educator, which Eric's is not.) Bret and his wife have been doing an educational series on COVID-19, which is quite accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-W9O7qhstY&list=PLjQ2gC-5yHEt7hPOrxyU6KNlrePgVe5-3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-W9O7qhstY&list=PLjQ2gC-5yH...
• mellosouls 6y ago
  Could somebody explain to Stephen Wolfram physics is already underway and the normal way to join in is to publish your ideas in appropriate venues and submit them to peer review?
  • api 6y ago
    It's been waiting for a genius, a visionary, a maverick, ... Wolfram's narcissism is so extreme it's just comical. When I was really into complexity science and stuff everyone in the field would joke about it, suggesting a drinking game where you take a shot every time Wolfram refers to how he was a gifted child or started studying math in his teens or single-handedly accomplished some amazing feat. The guy toots his own horn like a circus clown. It's too bad because he actually does have some very interesting ideas and a good skill at explaining things. His narcissism is self-defeating. He needs to just chill out, write like a normal human being, and publish. Maybe he should take up amateur astronomy. Nothing gives perspective more than carefully observing photons older than the human species with your own eyes. I sometimes recommend A New Kind of Science with a huge caveat. It's a decent compendium of fascinating cellular automata, complexity, and theoretical CS research with some interesting speculation attached, but (1) Wolfram did not invent all this or do all this work himself, and (2) he takes his speculation too far to the point of flirting with crackpottery. If you can read NKS with those caveats in mind, it's worth at least skimming and taking in the interesting bits.
    • blablabla123 6y ago
      In university a professor was explaining how Wolfram formulated Physics in the 80s through finite automata instead of Mathematics, that must be the NKS. Is it actually (at least theoretically ;)) possible to calculate something with it, so that results match for instance Newtonian Physics?
      • api 6y ago
        It's "just" a different way of formulating mathematics, but sometimes formulating things differently can yield insights. At least attempting physics from this angle is a project with merit, especially since it seems as if conventional mathematical theoretical physics is a little stuck lately. The problem with the CA-based physics approaches are that while you can create CA models that work and are predictive in ways that mimic conventional mathematical models, so far the approach has failed to produce a compelling model with testable predictions that is unique to the approach. In other words there's no evidence (yet?) that this approach is better than conventional math, and a strong contrary argument in favor of math can be made from the angle that math maps more clearly to the conceptual space. It's possible to read an equation in terms of the concepts it models, assign units to variables that refer to specific forces or properties, etc. I'm not aware of a way to do that with CA. What you get there are weird rules that manifest something that seems to fit existing mathematical models or concrete observations, but those weird rules are "opaque." It's a relative to the opaqueness problem in AI / machine learning. Lastly though I would add that the fact that you can create compelling CA models of physics at all does perhaps suggest something about reality. Maybe it suggests that reality is or is similar to a CA system under the hood. The fact that quantum comes from "quanta" and "quantized" suggests that things are in fact discrete at some level.
• deleted 6y ago
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• ur-whale 6y ago
  Applying arbitrary iterated transformation rules on graphs is very, very cool. But I don't think there's much in the way of existing theoretical math attacking this area. Much will need to be invented / discovered.
  • mikhailfranco 6y ago
    There is a big existing literature. Look at 'graph grammars'.
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• martythemaniak 6y ago
  I think this has a better chance of succeeding than Hacker News having a Wolfram-related thread that isn't 50% slagging the guy.
  • dang 6y ago
    Is it down to 50%? That's remarkable.
  • natalyarostova 6y ago
    It's super sad. I don't know much about Physics at all. But I suspect any huge breakthrough will come when 1000s of people, like Wolfram, spend their life's effort to solve an incredibly hard problem. Almost all will fail, but some will succeed, and at the start it won't be obvious who is on the right path vs. who is a 'crank.' Imagine just sitting at home, constantly talking shit and disparaging someone who has dedicated themselves to solving an almost intractably hard problem. And I say that as someone with no particular interest or liking of Wolfram.
    • knzhou 6y ago
      Well, here I am talking shit about Wolfram, but I'm a physicist. There are thousands of us spending our lives on incredibly hard problems. The only difference between Wolfram and Weinstein and the rest of us is that they're declaring victory in an incredibly premature, flashy way. When the rest of us have an idea, we try hard to prove it wrong (which is fundamental to how science works), not search for a lay audience to promote it to.
      • natalyarostova 6y ago
        Fair enough. I'm not a physicist, so I'll defer to you on this. Do you think Wolfram's strange style is worth trying, as a moon-shot? (Ignoring for a second his personality).
        • knzhou 6y ago
          Physics research being the way it is, everything is worth trying if somebody really believes in it, because everything is a moonshot. I'm personally working on one right now, so I'm too busy to work on Wolfram's, but more power to him if he wants to continue! My personal intuition is that a new language is only useful if it has enough "meat" to constrain things. For example, most physicists know almost nothing about logic, because it seems so far upstream of everything else that changes in it have no effect. (Indeed, logic has changed a lot in the past 100 years, and nothing happened to us!) But almost everybody in physics agrees that the language of differential forms is awesome, because with some minimal assumptions, they say that there's essentially one way to write down the theory of electromagnetism -- and it turns out to be the right way. Similarly, it looks like there's little promise in applying computability theory to physics, because it is grounded in what happens "at infinity" (and hence does not lend itself to predicting anything in our inherently finite experiments), but real promise in applying information theory and computational complexity theory, which can tell us about asymptotics. So that was why my first reaction is that Wolfram's exceedingly general language wouldn't be very helpful. However, attitudes can and have changed. If Wolfram and co. come up with a sharp success, where they derive something important without directly putting what they want to get into their starting assumptions, people would pay attention. That's precisely why, e.g. special and general relativity, quantum field theory and string theory are so important today. They all started this way.
• tinman25 6y ago
  So basically this: https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/ huh Stephen? -Question has anyone validated and/or disproved his Geometric Rules based approach and NKS Cellular automata against traditional physics models and found predictable conclusions that can be tested via experiment? IE is it really anything other alternative notation/representation system? It essentially presupposes a computational canvas to the universe,but in what substrate does this computation happen? Obviously the guy has an ego the size of a black hole (and probably as insecure about it, since the whole website (beautifully produced of course) has no community forum, comment section or space for peer review about the theories he presents.. He really needs to get away from sycophants in his company and engage with outside world. Citing others would help. New perspectives on physics and mathematical descriptions of the universe are welcome and I'm sure there is plenty of insights to be found..who knows exactly, since the investment in learning and understanding his approach requires substantial effort to decode and without prediction . sad to see how little things like a ego of one little man can both be a source of insight and frustration at the same time..
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • 0-_-0 6y ago
    Hey, that's my favorite XKCD!
  • stupidcar 6y ago
    There's a "Discussion Forum" link on the homepage.
  • vntok 6y ago
    I haven't seen the ideas he presents over there exposed anywhere else in either science publications, global media or even hobbyist blogs. Maybe there's a lesson there that some smart minds might do better when absolving themselves of the constraints of traditional science processes and publishing rythm? Now this guy is in a very interesting position, as someone who became fixated upon an interesting (?) phenomenon at one point in his life, then spent decades studying it, wrote books and papers about it, designed a fundamental theory basically ex nihilo based on his grand idea about that field (I'm not arguing for/against the theory's veracity here), AND then built a whole toolset around it all to do research, AND wrote books about his research, AND recorded hours of videos, AND now apparently is putting it all online for people to get easy access for free. He's thought about something, he's worked it and now he's sharing it all. So I'm kind of curious, what more do you want him to do at this point?
• plutonorm 6y ago
  This makes perfect sense, bravo. Go straight to the most general structure possible and try to understand which part of the infinite mathematical structure of the multiverse we inhabit. How interesting that within all possible structures they have found objects that so readily match up with our own reality.
  • freyrs3 6y ago
    Showing how Yang-Mills and SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) fall out would be a natural starting point for a proposed unification theory. This model doesn't even try explain the existing particle hierarchy as a special case.
• m12k 6y ago
  The general tone of the comments here seems to be 'Stephen Wolfram is a pompous ass, so we shouldn't listen to anything he has to say'. After reading through the post I think that, yes, he probably is a pompous ass (you could certainly have trimmed out the paragraphs that sound like a self-congratulatory auto-biography without losing much), but I really hope people don't just ignore this because of that. There are some legitimately interesting things going on here, and I hope other, more traditional, rigorous, and less hype-prone scientific minds are willing to dive into it to see where it leads. If it'll actually be a unification of relativity and quantum mechanics, who knows, but there's definitely _something_ here, and I'd hate for it to just get ignored because of distaste for the man. There are some actual scientific predictions here - e.g. that there is a maximum speed at which quantum entanglements can happen, analogous to the speed of light in relativity - which I hope people start thinking about ways of designing experiments for/falsifying.
  • jonathan_gorard 6y ago
    Thanks for your encouraging comments! There is already a proposed observational test for the maximum entanglement rate hypothesis (based on the location of the stretched horizon in the context of black hole physics), proposed here: https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some-quantum-mechanical-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
  • fl0wenol 6y ago
    That's great and all. But if the man decides to distill his current progress into a high-level overview so that a relative layman can understand the team's progress and the implications, then it demonstrates he is aware of an audience and their perceptions, otherwise he wouldn't waste his time writing the summary/blog post. In the course of all that, he should realize that his own tone is very off-putting and maybe workshop it a bit? Because otherwise it seems very self-indulgent, a bit of mental masturbation in the large, and that itself is a huge red flag. It is for others to point at someone's work and say, hey, this is huge. If a person says it themselves, then you are right to have serious reservations or skip it.
• knzhou 6y ago
  I don't see anything of substance here, besides a lot of pretty graphs. Just like Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", we have the problem that there is a vast gulf between what you need to make flashy popsci and what you need to make a real physical theory. In increasing order of difficulty, you need to: 1. make a set of dynamical rules that matches general relativity in the low energy limit, such as recovering Lorentz invariance and the Einstein field equation (this is supposed to be the easiest part -- without at least doing this, a theory of everything is worth less than the graph doodles in my middle school notebooks) 2. demonstrate that you can add something that looks like matter 3. reproduce effects that we know have to appear in quantum gravity in the semiclassical limit, such as Hawking radiation and black hole entropy 4. demonstrate that you can add matter that behaves like the Standard Model 5. make specific predictions that we didn't already know from purely semiclassical considerations 6. find a way to verify those predictions 7. have the predictions actually be correct upon verification These 7 steps are hard, which is why nobody has managed to do them. But it looks like Wolfram hasn't even bothered to start on step 1. His new book is just hundreds and hundreds of pages of pretty graphs and big words. It's more akin to a reformulation of the foundations of mathematics than a theory of physics -- and it's not a particularly good one, at that. It's the same complaint I have about category theorists trying to do applied physics. (And category theory is a much more powerful language than Wolfram's!) Yes, you might have an incredibly general language, with which you can talk about vast swaths of possible physical theories. But we already had way too many possibilities using ordinary mathematics! We need to narrow down on specifics, not muddy the waters by making things even more general. I mean, it's like trying to rescue a startup by translating the documentation into Esperanto.
  • mjburgess 6y ago
    Is the following section a beginning of an attempt at that? https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/potential-relation-to-physics/ https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/potent...
    • knzhou 6y ago
      Not really. It's very vague -- he is just repeatedly saying "well, you could write down X in terms of graphs in this way." But you can write down anything in terms of anything. You can write a compiler in PowerPoint because it's Turing complete. You can write the Bible in Klingon. You can write about making a burrito in category theory. Languages are just packaging. In order to have content, you have to nail down specifics, and here the choice of language can be useful because the specifics might be more naturally expressed in some languages than others. But Wolfram hasn't begun this journey.
• crazygringo 6y ago
  As much as the guy can be annoying, the associated "Project Announcement" is a fascinating 20,000-word-ish article. [1] I've long assumed that the basic structure of the universe must be some kind of graph, simply because it's the most elementary structure there seems to be, and so easily gives rise to dimensionality. So seeing someone try to tackle this bottom-up and see if it can ultimately give rise to quantum mechanics and beyond sure is fun to watch. [1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
  • chrisco255 6y ago
    Do you think the simulation uses Neo4J or JanusGraph?
    • danpalmer 6y ago
      It’s probably implemented in Mathematica, so probably not.
      • perardi 6y ago
        It's all Mathematica/Wolfram Language. And a very, very warm computer.
  • hutzlibu 6y ago
    "I've long assumed that the basic structure of the universe must be some kind of graph, " Do you mean this literally, or rather: "the basic structure of the universe CAN BE DESCRIBED by some kind of graph"?
    • crazygringo 6y ago
      Literally, i.e. the fabric of space-time. Then particles and energy are patterns in the graph -- that we can describe useful physics in terms of the graph, but that the graph just is, it's not a description or approximation of something deeper. Unless there's a semantic difference you're getting at that I'm not aware of?
• carlob 6y ago
  If someone wants to read something that is more like a classical physics paper there are these two papers by Jonathan Gorard: https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some-relativistic-and-gravitational-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so... https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some-quantum-mechanical-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
  • jonathan_gorard 6y ago
    Cheers!
  • bhouston 6y ago
    Are these going to be submitted for appropriate peer review?
    • jonathan_gorard 6y ago
      They already have, as I said in response to your other version of the same question :)
      • nil-sec 6y ago
        I’ve read through your GR part. Just to counter all the negativity here, congrats for pulling this off! I felt your papers do a much better job in explaining what’s actually the idea. Probably would be better to directly link to them here on HN. I’m a bit rusty but everything you write seems very reasonable to me. One thing I was a bit nervous about, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that you seem to somewhat artificially put in “causal invariance” by restricting all hyper graphs you consider to those that have this property. This isn’t obvious from the rule itself and it seems like it could just go wrong at one point deep into the time evolution. Are you worried about that? Edit: Additionally the model seems very flexible. To the point that I’m unsure whether it’s surprising to be able to recover GR and other properties. I’m out of my depth here but given that string theory seems to face a similar problem of model selection have you looked at equivalences between those or does this not make sense in your eyes?
• aj7 6y ago
  As long as some variant of the Game of Life isn’t one of the contenders…
• themodelplumber 6y ago
  > A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics Physics noob here, but I do a lot of theory / model development in other areas, at work and in my batcave. So I'm wondering: What if there are multiple fundamental theories, just like there are millions of different ways of looking at things, all with their various leverage/application points? > we’re going to have to find the specific rule for our universe I just wonder what makes someone so sure there is a specific rule, when humans are good at generating untold numbers of rules, and in my experience those rules can be very effective _and_ work best together when held lightly, rather than exclusively. (If anything, humans seem more likely to become dangerously dogmatic when they feel they have identified "the one" of something. Like a human anti-pattern.)
  • aaronax 6y ago
    I think this might relate to what he discusses at the end of the very long Project Announcement blog/article. Something like there may be many different rules, but the one we find will be correct for us due to the framework we have for evaluating the universe (senses, math, etc.).
    • themodelplumber 6y ago
      If it's correct to the framework we have--do we have "a framework" for evaluating the universe? It seems more like there are many. Within senses--millions of frameworks. Within math, millions. And for good reason; this lens offers a different look at this aspect, and this other lens offers a singular view of that one. Stars are white. Stars are blue or red or yellow. Stars have no color. All of these true and helpful, and also conflicting in some context or another. Looking at the way he's evaluating universes and aiming to find one that's so well matched to ours, just intuitively I also have to wonder how many different ways there are of modeling our universe that are worth keeping around no matter how poorly they fit in even some big ways. Interesting stuff to think about though.
• RunningToMars 6y ago
  The livestream just started (www.youtube.com/WolframResearch). Sounds like it's going to be quite interesting and informative.
• dang 6y ago
  I'm going to try to merge the other thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867707) hither. Please stand by. Edit: that's done. I adopted the other title, in the hope that it will have less of a flamebait effect. All: no more Wolfram Derangement Syndrome comments, please. They're off topic because they're always the same, and they compose into a weird counterversion of the very thing they're deriding. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20wolfram&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  • mnemonicsloth 6y ago
    > no more Wolfram Derangement Syndrome comments, please. They're off topic because they're always the same, and they compose into a weird counterversion of the very thing they're deriding. If you really can't stand it then kill the thread. But Wolfram is a bad actor in a discipline that runs on reputation. He needs to be talked about.
    • mellosouls 6y ago
      I agree with this. These theories would not get any traction whatsoever were it not for the entirely-physics-unrelated fame of their author. It's important that that is pointed out, not everybody reading them will be aware and may invest time they wouldn't grant to the hundreds of other people promoting their pet Theories of Everything without the benefit of credit with programmers and startup followers.
    • jjoonathan 6y ago
      Agreed. Not talking about it sends a very clear message of implicit endorsement and agreement. In contrast, talking about it teaches those who haven't encountered him before how he works. Without that knowledge, one is liable to either get swept up in his aggressive, self-centered reality distortion field or reject him outright as blogspam. Neither response is appropriate. He deserves positive attention for his ideas and negative attention for the reality distortion field, and these discussions serve that purpose.
• TrainedMonkey 6y ago
  Incorrect predictions are all the rage nowadays, so here is mine: they will find an infinite amount of rule sets that could be the fundamental theory. However, none of it would be testable, so people would pick their own based on their notion of simplicity and beauty. Eventually people would start looking into common properties of the candidate solutions and transformations between them.
  • _jal 6y ago
    Take it further - eventually we will have conceptual physicists whose output is judged on purely aesthetic grounds, and rich people will collect them.
    • jl2718 6y ago
      That’s called string theory.
  • skosch 6y ago
    No need to be so smug, he says exactly that in the article. Take another look and read the section "Why This Universe? The Relativity of Rules".
• Koshkin 6y ago
  Well, phenomena analogous to what is described by quantum mechanics, for example, have been found in physics of solids (e.g. phonons). Shouldn't be surprising, then, that such a universal and rather abstract structure as a graph (especially if you allow to 'update' it) can be made to reflect some aspects of physical reality. Computations are computations, whichever way you approach them. Classical electrodynamics, too, has several equivalent formulations (with the tensorial notation being pretty "graphical" IMHO), and some people do like to create a fuss around particular ones, but that ain't nothing we haven't seen before. What is important, though, is to always make a distinction between a model and the real thing: it wouldn't make sense to say that spacetime is some kind of a graph. (Or would it?)
• bronzeage 6y ago
  I'm a big fan of Gerard t' Hooft's Cellular Automata Interpretation. Most of the things described by Wolfram were already there, in fact, I would argue that most of the things with strict connection to real physics were already described by Gerard t' Hooft in a similar manner (energy and momentum interpretations are very similar) However, they are different in that Gerard t'Hooft has a single ontic state where Wolfram has branching from undeterministic applications of rules. I'm not sure how Wolfram can derive unitary evolution. The graph rewriting is cool and novel. I do agree that cellular automata are somewhat limited. Their most obvious limitation is having Manhattan distance. 4 or 8 directions to move through in lower level is something that effects large scale. But most of the models wolfram proposes still produce some grid-like structure, and in some sense his visualization is misleading.
  • AgentME 6y ago
    >where Wolfram has branching from undeterministic applications of rules. I'm not sure how Wolfram can derive unitary evolution. I don't think it's right to call it nondeterministic: every possible sequence of rules happens, separately. It seems to lend itself easily to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM.
    • acjohnson55 6y ago
      I don't know if that's true, because I think the idea of a rule having causal invariance is that the many paths converge anyway into causal sequences of events that always hold.
• zakk 6y ago
  This is absolutely fascinating. Even just a demonstration that rule application on hypergraphs is expressive enough to potentially describe (for some rule yet to be found) Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity is incredibly exciting in my opinion. Arguably string theory is in a similar situation: a very powerful framework that could potentially describe reality if accurately utilized. Also, notably Gerard 't Hooft has been working on a very similar topic recently: Quantum Mechanics described in terms of cellular automata [0]. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548 https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548
  • rantwasp 6y ago
    the idea is kind of old and even Wolfram played with it in his previous work/book, ie A new kind of science. If you're interested in the subject and also can appreciate what feels like a piece of performance art give the following book a shot: https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Information-Theory-Psychedelic-Technologies/dp/1527234762 https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Information-Theory-Psychedelic-... It's mind-blowing and uses as one of its starting points Wofram's 1D cellular automata work.
• dang 6y ago
  We merged this thread with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867707 and kept its title, in the hope that it would have less of a flamebait effect. All: no more Wolfram Derangement Syndrome comments, please. They're off topic because they're always the same, and they compose into a weird counterversion of the very thing they're deriding. Since this comment was becoming top heavy, I forked it. If you want the meta-meta stuff, it's this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22869384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22869384.
• zwaps 6y ago
  Can someone tell me how this relates to the hype of, well it must be some decades back, chaos theory in dynamical systems? The idea then was the following: We do not need "randomness" and probability theory in our models, once we realize that deterministic systems, even simple ones, can produce arbitrarily complex outcomes. For example, this was all the rage in economics in the 90's. Surely, those are dynamical systems and besides having an actual proper reason for probabilistic reasoning, one wanted to at least consider that modeling deterministic systems without any randomness could fit reality. I also make this point because in this instance, graph based discrete models often have a continuous equivalent and it depends on the case which of those offers more useful outcomes. If I remember correctly, the hype about chaotic systems died down in part because while we could formulate substantively powerful foundations, it was extremely difficult to "get something useful out of it" and it all seemed to go more or less nowhere.
• SuperTachyon 6y ago
  I briefly read through the article. As a PhD student in theoretical physics, I can see that some basic ideas of gr and qm can be interpreted out of these graphs. But I’m not convinced why these graphs have to be generated by a single rule. I don’t see any motivation in restricting to a single rule or even procedural generation at all. It also reminds me of the casual set theory that I heard briefly from a professor a few years ago. I was told that it re-creates vacuum gr just well.
  • skosch 6y ago
    > But I’m not convinced why these graphs have to be generated by a single rule. Wolfram claims that they don't need to be; on the contrary. Take another look at the last section of the article.
• sabujp 6y ago
  i'm very confused about how I can get from these pretty graphs to all of these : https://physics.info/equations/ https://physics.info/equations/
• AgentME 6y ago
  I've always liked the idea that the universe worked something like a cellular automaton at its lowest level, but I was always uncomfortable with how that presupposed a specific grid and a very rigid system of time. This system of hypergraph-rewriting excites me because it seems like a more generalized form/alternative to cellular automatons that fixes these issues. And then it's super exciting to see that you can get relativity and QM-like effects as emergent properties from this sort of system.
  • ncmncm 6y ago
    Each generation imagines God as whatever is coolest right then. In Newton's day, the universe was a tower clock. Humanity will be around for, well, a few more years, not a blink of the universe's eye. Our grandchildren will have time to look into things, if civilization doesn't collapse. What are the odds that they will decide we were right, that the universe really is something we know about already?
• naasking 6y ago
  A lot of people criticize Wolfram, but I think the project he's pursuing is definitely worthwhile. Quantization has proven to be an incredibly powerful tool, and it's only the first step to turning our continuous physics into a discrete model. Starting with cellular automata is flipping the table over and starting the game anew, starting with discrete models instead of continuous models, with the ultimate goal of producing a purely discrete theory for all of physics. Discretizing everything has the potential to provide new mathematical tools and new insights that our continuous theories might obscure. There's a lot of hidden computation in the reals and complex numbers that a discrete theory would have to explicitly unpack, and some of these details might potentially shed light on some real puzzles.
• gibsonf1 6y ago
  This is incredible! Thanks you for sharing it.
• Rury 6y ago
  How is what’s mentioned here, not just the old idea of determinism demonstrated or shown from a different perspective? I always thought science was biased toward the assumption that the universe follows basic deterministic rules, and the purpose of doing science was to find the nature of those rules. What I mean by this, is that when we do science, we are trying to determine the nature behind things - are we not? Therefore, determining things, or determinism, is at the heart of doing science. Assuming otherwise, seems like a disservice to practicing science, but maybe that's just me? Granted, I know nothing is settled yet, but I have a hard time seeing anything new here. Just old ideas communicated in an analogous new perspective…
  • ldlework 6y ago
    > I have a hard time seeing anything new here. > Just .. [a] new perspective... okie dokie
    • Rury 6y ago
      tomato-tomato.
• undershirt 6y ago
  I got stuck on causality invariance—not getting the orange edges on the graph. It seemed like the root should’ve been connected to every node, so I’m clearly missing something.
• bane 6y ago
  I'm not qualified to consider the physics ramifications of what's presented here, but the graph rewriting rules are really interesting and almost seem glaringly obvious in retrospect. I don't know if there's prior work with them but I can think of a few immediate applications for synthetic data generation that would benefit from this approach.
• neosat 6y ago
  Not qualified to comment on the depth of physics in there, but the theory sounds very intriguing and fascinating. It's important to push our collective thinking - and the authors definitely have the expertise to do that.
• crubier 6y ago
  Nice! This will be seen in the future either as a Nobel prize winning, first revolutionary paper on the theory of everything, or as just another marketing white paper for Mathematica. I can’t tell, but it is interesting for sure!
• joycian 6y ago
  Most of this structure comes from the ordered set properties. Special relativity can be seen as a consequence of trying to quantify length by projecting to two ordered sets. K.H. Knuth, a professor at Albany, has been working on this for some time. He also has some results about QM. A free version of his paper "A Potential Foundation for Emergent Space-Time" (2014). What Wolfram is talking about seems to me a consequence of the principles K.H. Knuth has been investigating since at least 2011. https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.0881 https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.0881
• 8bitsrule 6y ago
  Eddington too had a 'Fundamental Theory'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington#Fundamental_theory_and_the_Eddington_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington#Fundamental_t... "Eddington believed he had identified an algebraic basis for fundamental physics, which he termed 'E-numbers' .... These in effect incorporated spacetime into a higher-dimensional structure. While his theory has long been neglected by the general physics community...."
• scottlocklin 6y ago
  TLDR "if you stare at these weird screensavers long enough, it kinda looks like physics. if you are rich enough to hire a PR team to push the idea; lots of credulous people might agree with you." For an example of similar quackery from quantitative finance, Espen Haug's ideas are funner: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Espen_Haug https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Espen_Haug
• tagrun 6y ago
  This looks very interesting and impressive, and I hope this will catch Jonathan's eye. Have you though about how the spin of particles could work in this framework? And have you though about what it would look like to extend local gauge invariance from spacetime to multiway? (I haven't read the actual papers and the assumptions that went into them yet, but to the summary is very impressive and exciting: a basic framework that can derive general relativity and path integral, put them together in equal footing in an extended "multiway", possibly give natural explanations to several long-standing puzzles of physics [dark matter, dark energy, black holes, black hole information paradox, measurement problem, inflation, dimensionality of the universe, arrow of time, ...]. I don't know if you can eventually find a rule that will result in the standard model, but everything fits so far, and it is possibly not a coincidence. Great work so far! Of course, it may or not may not lead to something that recovers all of the physics that we know today, but regardless, thanks for pursuing this exciting avenue!)
• gdm85 6y ago
  The concept of "connectives" as explained in Frank Herbert's Whipping Star book comes to mind. One critic remark to make: I am not impressed by the "complex looks" of the hypergraphs because the initial premise is that it does not matter how we visualise them.
• sasaf5 6y ago
  Lots of "I" right in the first paragraph. If only Wolfram would hire some editors so that we could enjoy his ideas without all the distraction...
• fal_ 6y ago
  Is it possible to use the knowledge in this paper, which uses machine learning to derive the simple rules for the creation of a specific state and apply it to Wolfram's Physics Project? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXzauli1TyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXzauli1TyU
• amai 6y ago
  Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system. Other interesting related theories might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_aggregation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_aggregation or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_theory.
• nickw1881 6y ago
  Has any commenter here read the blog post? He starts from "network that evolves through simple rules" then goes on to derive how this results in space dimensionality, time, Sr, GR, the uncertainty principle, path integral, entanglement, and makes predictions along the way. This is regardless of the specific rule that computes our universe. Also since that rule is Turing complete, it's going to be the same as every other Turing complete rule, and since we can't produce a machine IN the universe that can simulate the universe, it kinda doesn't matter what the rule is.
• nil-nada-zilch 6y ago
  The most basic of the basic first step would be finding an infinite series for calculating Pi, that has only positive elements... like Ramanujan's series, but not quite, because elements of this series have to produce numbers Nk, for each step k (k=0->infinity), that satisfy the following condition: Nk/k->2Pi for k->infinity. Until this is achieved (finally giving the complete description of this discrete space/graph of this space), nothing further can be done in physics. Furthermore... it is not even needed to prove that this space is discrete, because uncertainty principle already proves that it is, by taking notice of the fact that in continuous spaces, quanta of action/momentum/energy can be made arbitrarily small (and, in fact, is equal to 0), which means that h can be made arbitrarily small (and, in fact, is equal to 0). In other words, uncertainty principle only makes makes sense in discrete spaces... and, as experiments (from 100+ years ago) have already proven, h > 0 in the space this universe is made of (meaning that this space is discrete). Q.E.D. Edit: typo and... typo with missing constant 2 from circumference formula. Addition: Pi is Pi only because of the spatial (graph) configuration. In another uniform space, with a different configuration, circumference formula would have the form of: Nk=aCk, where a is some value (like 2), and C is the (Pi-like) constant derived from spatial (graph) configuration >alone<. Edit: Added missing k to the general circumference formula. I should really proof-read better, but I'm in a kind of hurry, so you'll forgive me an occasional mistake or two.
• nil-nada-zilch 6y ago
  Also... one of fundamental flaws of Wolfram Physics Project's meta-model is that it uses weightless graphs. There is literally nothing in his model that can prevent his beautiful graphs from simply collapsing in on themselves, with all the points just piling up on top of each other into a naked singularity before they've even succeeded at forming any space at all! For starters, empty space should have weighted (space-like) connections of the weight value of 1. This accomplishes two things: a) prevents the space from outright collapsing in on itself, and b) forces the space to form a stable configuration For b) part, imagine a 2-dimensional discrete space (graph) made of hexagonal shapes. You will immediately notice that weighing knot (node) connections (with the value of 1) forces that space to maintain a stable spherical configuration (providing that it had formed uniformly to start with. Expand this concept to 3 dimensions, and you'll get a similarly stable 3D configuration (that has been uniformly expanding from the very first step of 1), with 2D surface (at any distance r/step k from the center) being a very good candidate for defining a holographic principle (of some form or another) on. Now... ... wait for Wofram to expand his model with weighted graphs... and then sue his sorry ass for stealing somebody else's idea. P.S. One of the fundamental flaws of WPP's meta-meta-model is... Wolfram himself. A terrible, terrible choice for managing the, literally, biggest breakthrough in physics since QM.
• McTossOut 6y ago
  Of course theoretical physics of this sort will be an affront to many. Practically speaking though, broad speculation aside, it seems reasonable to desire to just simulate, and brute force something as simple as the first 10^-150s of the universe. Only when you must account for the language that has been constructed in the past 350 years of coarse observation does it seem like madness. When they move forward with this, and the results of their computing displays an independently generated imprint of the cosmic background radiation, the results will be undeniable. It likely will escape language for decades, but if they run the simulation at this granularity and come to an exact match it will reveal either that our theories are exact and precise, or where we have missed phenomena. Bravo, from an (at least) inspirational grounds though.