5 ms·

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, Wol

by gfodor 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
    Sure, theoretical high-energy physics (i.e. particle physics) seems to be in somewhat of a dead end when it comes to finding a theory of everything. But this is an incredibly small part of theoretical physics.
- meowface 7y ago
  It's not dead in the sense that we've done a better job of experimentally confirming things like general relativity and aspects of quantum mechanics, due to being able to accurately perform more precise observations (like with LHC and LIGO). I'd say this is a triumph of advances in experimental physics, though, rather than theoretical physics. There doesn't seem to have been any widely accepted fundamental theoretical breakthrough like general relativity or quantum mechanics for a long time, nor has there been any widely accepted way to unify the two theories. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the impression I and many others have.
  - DubiousPusher 7y ago
    This is pure speculation on my part so take it for a grain of salt. But I generally don't find that fields just stop advancing or go cold. It seems to me that usually what is happening is there is a lot of work going on at a level that does not make a lot of sense to report to a lay audience or at leas the media which covers the subject does not think a lay audience could understand or would be interested in it. Co Sider biology. What is the last major biology idea that made a huge public splsh? DNA? The human genome sequence? But are biologists stuck the world round? Of course not there have been hundreds if not thousands of notable biology findings in the past 20 years. Theoretical physics probably simply appears stuck to us because as lay people we focus on a couple of large scale questions that for now are probably out of reach. But we don't consider the hundreds of theoretical physics refinements and observations that need to go into the development of the LHC or LIGO or James Webb etc. Anyway, that's just like my opinion man.
    - meowface 7y ago
      True, there probably have been some important refinements, but part of the issue is that a lot of that work has been done along very long, sometimes many-decades long, paths that so far have had zero experimental validation. Basically, people have been building giant ladders and constantly improving them, but we don't know if any of the ladders were put up against the right wall. We have no idea if these theories actually correspond to reality or not. For example, string theory and supersymmetry. The LHC was created partly with the goal and expectation of detecting particles that would validate supersymmetry, but so far it hasn't, and many are beginning to believe the theory may be flawed or wrong. In some sense that is a bit of a theoretical advancement, but so far, supersymmetry theorists don't appear to have a popular alternative they're considering instead. If they fail to find evidence for it in the next 10 or so years, it's probably just a total dead end. And string theory has been at it for even longer.
DantesKite 7y ago
I feel the same way. His book A New Kind of Science (the first chapters) have been revolutionary. I think his work will lay down the foundations of science for centuries to come. It is curious though. Nearly every criticism I’ve read hasn’t grappled with his ideas—just the man, out of insecurity and ego. And he’s a lovely writer. I don’t sense ego from him. Just honesty about the work he’s done and contributed. You read him and get the sense his prose is calm—like light particles flowing down a river. His stories about the remarkable scientists he’s met is some of the best writing I’ve ever read.
- gfodor 7y ago
  One potential archetype for him that is consistent is he simply cannot recognize these political concerns. Many of us feel anxiety about the idea we may be interpreted as stepping on peoples' work, or failing to recognize their efforts and how they may have led to our own advancement. It may be that Wolfram, for whatever reason, simply doesn't have that - not out of malice, but just as a core deficiency in his ability to empathize. Any person like that would be viewed as a bull in a china shop, even if everything they wrote never directly attacked or diminished others - and that seems to be the case here. The problems people have with Wolfram are problems of "insult by omission" or "implicit bragging" - not about things that are on the page, but the things that aren't. Anyone who lacks this kind of empathy would simply not write them, and be confused as to why people react to their writing the way so many do.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    His self-promotional patter is so simple and consistent you can train half-convincing markov models on it; clearly he could intellectually understand the problem and tone it down a notch or five if he wanted to. He doesn't, and IMO that makes him responsible.
    - gfodor 7y ago
      You literally are illustrating my point. He clearly doesn't. Motives unknown. Could be a personality disorder. In any case, rational people ought to just get over it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Koshkin 7y ago
As a foundation for computational methods, 99.9% of theoretical physics is very much alive.

by gfodor 7y ago

DubiousPusher 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
  Sure, theoretical high-energy physics (i.e. particle physics) seems to be in somewhat of a dead end when it comes to finding a theory of everything. But this is an incredibly small part of theoretical physics.
meowface 7y ago
It's not dead in the sense that we've done a better job of experimentally confirming things like general relativity and aspects of quantum mechanics, due to being able to accurately perform more precise observations (like with LHC and LIGO). I'd say this is a triumph of advances in experimental physics, though, rather than theoretical physics. There doesn't seem to have been any widely accepted fundamental theoretical breakthrough like general relativity or quantum mechanics for a long time, nor has there been any widely accepted way to unify the two theories. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the impression I and many others have.
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  This is pure speculation on my part so take it for a grain of salt. But I generally don't find that fields just stop advancing or go cold. It seems to me that usually what is happening is there is a lot of work going on at a level that does not make a lot of sense to report to a lay audience or at leas the media which covers the subject does not think a lay audience could understand or would be interested in it. Co Sider biology. What is the last major biology idea that made a huge public splsh? DNA? The human genome sequence? But are biologists stuck the world round? Of course not there have been hundreds if not thousands of notable biology findings in the past 20 years. Theoretical physics probably simply appears stuck to us because as lay people we focus on a couple of large scale questions that for now are probably out of reach. But we don't consider the hundreds of theoretical physics refinements and observations that need to go into the development of the LHC or LIGO or James Webb etc. Anyway, that's just like my opinion man.
  - meowface 7y ago
    True, there probably have been some important refinements, but part of the issue is that a lot of that work has been done along very long, sometimes many-decades long, paths that so far have had zero experimental validation. Basically, people have been building giant ladders and constantly improving them, but we don't know if any of the ladders were put up against the right wall. We have no idea if these theories actually correspond to reality or not. For example, string theory and supersymmetry. The LHC was created partly with the goal and expectation of detecting particles that would validate supersymmetry, but so far it hasn't, and many are beginning to believe the theory may be flawed or wrong. In some sense that is a bit of a theoretical advancement, but so far, supersymmetry theorists don't appear to have a popular alternative they're considering instead. If they fail to find evidence for it in the next 10 or so years, it's probably just a total dead end. And string theory has been at it for even longer.

DantesKite 7y ago

I feel the same way. His book A New Kind of Science (the first chapters) have been revolutionary. I think his work will lay down the foundations of science for centuries to come. It is curious though. Nearly every criticism I’ve read hasn’t grappled with his ideas—just the man, out of insecurity and ego. And he’s a lovely writer. I don’t sense ego from him. Just honesty about the work he’s done and contributed. You read him and get the sense his prose is calm—like light particles flowing down a river. His stories about the remarkable scientists he’s met is some of the best writing I’ve ever read.

gfodor 7y ago
One potential archetype for him that is consistent is he simply cannot recognize these political concerns. Many of us feel anxiety about the idea we may be interpreted as stepping on peoples' work, or failing to recognize their efforts and how they may have led to our own advancement. It may be that Wolfram, for whatever reason, simply doesn't have that - not out of malice, but just as a core deficiency in his ability to empathize. Any person like that would be viewed as a bull in a china shop, even if everything they wrote never directly attacked or diminished others - and that seems to be the case here. The problems people have with Wolfram are problems of "insult by omission" or "implicit bragging" - not about things that are on the page, but the things that aren't. Anyone who lacks this kind of empathy would simply not write them, and be confused as to why people react to their writing the way so many do.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  His self-promotional patter is so simple and consistent you can train half-convincing markov models on it; clearly he could intellectually understand the problem and tone it down a notch or five if he wanted to. He doesn't, and IMO that makes him responsible.
  - gfodor 7y ago
    You literally are illustrating my point. He clearly doesn't. Motives unknown. Could be a personality disorder. In any case, rational people ought to just get over it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Koshkin 7y ago

As a foundation for computational methods, 99.9% of theoretical physics is very much alive.