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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 th

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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
    - VHRanger 7y ago
      Admittedly, I only skimmed NKS. That said, I don't understand how the approach is different than anything else abusing the incidental fact that something is Turing complete to re-prove existing results. The problem with these approaches, like trying to write a neural network in MS Excel, is that it's going to be cumbersome, slow, and provide little advantage over more straightforward calculation methods.
    - JackFr 7y ago
      There is an argument, and I think Wolfram has made it, that one would expect the systems and the math to become simpler the deeper and more fundamental the models became, and the opposite seems to be true with modern physics. When you say conventional math, you’re referring to math that would be quite difficult let’s say for even a dedicated undergraduate math, physics or electrical engineering major. The CA, on the other hand described a process an interested child can comprehend.
      - api 7y ago
        > one would expect the systems and the math to become simpler the deeper and more fundamental the models became The notion that there exists a single expression, CA rule, or other fundamental truth at the root of the physical universe is an arbitrary assumption. It may or may not be true. We should go where the evidence leads us. In the end we should have a model that is no more and no less complex than what is needed to model observed reality.
      - knzhou 7y ago
        But it's only easier to comprehend because it's vaguer. If you wanted to express specific, nontrivial mathematical statements in CA language, it would immediately get more complicated. Certainly, a paragraph about Euclid's Elements would be easier to comprehend than a paragraph from the Elements, but that's not a fair comparison...
        JackFr 7y ago
        But my point is if the CA and the mathematical expression show the same things, then you could say the mathematics are simply a roundabout and confusing way to characterize the CA. As a thought experiment (and a timely tribute) how would you (mathematically) characterize and/or describe an ongoing evolution of an instances of Conway's Game of Life if you didn't have a grid. Or even better, if you didn't have the grid and you could only see things a resolution of neighborhoods of 10-20 cell resolutions? You might be able to come up with some crazy complex math which does it. But if you knew about the grid and the underlying rules it would explain all of the observations perfectly AND more simply. Don't get me wrong -- I don't think Wolfram has done that, nor do I really hold out hope that it could be true. But it's a real compelling, if only it were.
- palimpsests 7y ago
  He certainly toots his own horn so incredibly much. I could never make it through NKS. Also, can't we observe photons older than human species with our naked eyes without taking up amateur astronomy?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Smaug123 7y ago
He… already knows this. https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/ https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/
- contravariant 7y ago
  Although it's also worth noting that that page states: >Note: Since 1987, Stephen Wolfram's intellectual efforts have not primarily been reported in academic articles.
  - Smaug123 7y ago
    This is true, but Wolfram was certainly a "normal" professional physicist for years before striking out on his own.
GuiA 7y ago
Well, his reasoning is sound enough - if his results are truly spectacular, it probably won’t matter that they weren’t published in peer reviewed venues. At the same time, turning boring results into something fit for publishing can be very time consuming - more than the research itself, and at the opportunity cost of attacking juicier problems. So if your goal is to utterly revolutionize a field, and you are very confident in your abilities to do so, it’s not the worst strategy in the world to just chase the ideas you’re most excited about and forgo the traditional bureaucratic paths.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  I haven't been deeply plugged into Wolfram's breakthroughs since "A New Kind Of Science," but if memory serves I don't think he's discovered anything that offers insight in the physics world in the utility sense. By which I mean: progress in physics usually looks like finding a novel relationship between previously-thought-separate phenomena, an improvement on the mechanics of using an existing theory for predictive power, or a conceptual simplification of existing theory (i.e. a new theory that completely explains the known observable phenomena of the previous theory while shaking out Russell's teapots the previous theory held). I don't think Wolfram's work in the physics space on the cellular automata model has met any of these criteria, so it's not surprising he's not getting mainstrean publication traction. His CA model isn't bringing us novel relationships (yet; I hold out hope here), it isn't making it easier to do what we already do, it hasn't yielded any predictions that existing theories don't also yield, and it's certainly not simpler than field theory and relationship formulae that don't assume a CA. Until there's a breakthrough in one of those three categories that can't be done easily with one of the traditional mechanisms, Wolfram's doing the scientific equivalent of translating lingua franca physics into Klingon; not really wasted effort in that it can be valuable to see something from more than one point of view, but not something that anyone's gonna pay him for or devote their precious column-inches to.
  - GuiA 7y ago
    I’ll let the next few hundred years judge how relevant or not his contribution to physics was. I don’t think anyone writing in 2020 has much sense of that.
ur-whale 7y ago
Sure, let's force one of the most creative dude of this century back into the rigid pen others are allowed to play in, just in case he does something crazy and interesting. What a lame idea, truly worthy of a mandarin.
- sixo 7y ago
  Aside: let's put "worthy of a mandarin" away forever
  - Octopodes 7y ago
    I've never heard the expression before. Could someone explain its meaning please?
    - Synaesthesia 7y ago
      An official or bureaucrat, particularly one that is reactionary and secretive. Eg. American Power and The New Mandarins. (Book) I think it’s an important and relevant term.
    - ur-whale 7y ago
      >Could someone explain its meaning please? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(bureaucrat) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(bureaucrat)
- GuiA 7y ago
  The guy pretty much single handedly built a profitable company that enables him to pursue whatever research interests he want, and that’s been going for over 30 years. They hate him cause they ain’t him.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    So did a lot of other people who aren’t extreme narcissists. I think it’s reasonable to find someone’s work admirable and yet think they have terrible personalities. There is a line of thought were people should be judged by what they create rather than how they behave, but luckily not many subscribe to it. Not even grown-up Linus Torvalds subscribes to it.
undefined1 7y ago
N'ah. It's good that folks like Wolfram and Eric Weinstein are taking a different path. Sometimes that's what it takes for new breakthroughs to emerge. If nothing else it could spark new ideas or invigorate others to take bolder approaches and move outside their comfort zone.
- hobofan 7y ago
  What path is Eric Weinstein taking? I've heard about him for the first time yesterday, when a section of his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was linked, where he talked much too confidently about a subject he probably shouldn't.
  - meowface 7y ago
    Which subject?
    - hobofan 7y ago
      He claimed that "all our laboratory mice are broken". Video links and discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/g0ioxq/if_it_is_true_that_laboratory_mice_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/g0ioxq/if_it_is_...
      - outlace 7y ago
        He's speaking on behalf of his brother Brett Weinstein, who is qualified to say such things.
        hobofan 7y ago
        There are still so many things wrong in how he tells the story that it doesn't pass a basic smell test for me. - He omits that this study was from 2000, so quite some time ago. Given that the paper about that has 200+ citations, I would say that it got the eyeballs it deserved. He doesn't offer any recent evidence that indicate that this is still the case today. - The core claim he makes "all mice are broken" is a hyperbole that a lot of people will tell you is unsubstantiated. He makes it sound like all tests done on mice are flawed because of it. - "I called them up and they were not able to produce any records that they changed their breeding protocols" doesn't mean that they didn't change them in the 20 years that passed. It just means that they didn't produce them to some random person contacting them. I'm not as "surprised nobody is breaking this story" as he is.

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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
  - VHRanger 7y ago
    Admittedly, I only skimmed NKS. That said, I don't understand how the approach is different than anything else abusing the incidental fact that something is Turing complete to re-prove existing results. The problem with these approaches, like trying to write a neural network in MS Excel, is that it's going to be cumbersome, slow, and provide little advantage over more straightforward calculation methods.
  - JackFr 7y ago
    There is an argument, and I think Wolfram has made it, that one would expect the systems and the math to become simpler the deeper and more fundamental the models became, and the opposite seems to be true with modern physics. When you say conventional math, you’re referring to math that would be quite difficult let’s say for even a dedicated undergraduate math, physics or electrical engineering major. The CA, on the other hand described a process an interested child can comprehend.
    - api 7y ago
      > one would expect the systems and the math to become simpler the deeper and more fundamental the models became The notion that there exists a single expression, CA rule, or other fundamental truth at the root of the physical universe is an arbitrary assumption. It may or may not be true. We should go where the evidence leads us. In the end we should have a model that is no more and no less complex than what is needed to model observed reality.
    - knzhou 7y ago
      But it's only easier to comprehend because it's vaguer. If you wanted to express specific, nontrivial mathematical statements in CA language, it would immediately get more complicated. Certainly, a paragraph about Euclid's Elements would be easier to comprehend than a paragraph from the Elements, but that's not a fair comparison...
      - JackFr 7y ago
        But my point is if the CA and the mathematical expression show the same things, then you could say the mathematics are simply a roundabout and confusing way to characterize the CA. As a thought experiment (and a timely tribute) how would you (mathematically) characterize and/or describe an ongoing evolution of an instances of Conway's Game of Life if you didn't have a grid. Or even better, if you didn't have the grid and you could only see things a resolution of neighborhoods of 10-20 cell resolutions? You might be able to come up with some crazy complex math which does it. But if you knew about the grid and the underlying rules it would explain all of the observations perfectly AND more simply. Don't get me wrong -- I don't think Wolfram has done that, nor do I really hold out hope that it could be true. But it's a real compelling, if only it were.
palimpsests 7y ago
He certainly toots his own horn so incredibly much. I could never make it through NKS. Also, can't we observe photons older than human species with our naked eyes without taking up amateur astronomy?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Smaug123 7y ago

He… already knows this. https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/ https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/

contravariant 7y ago
Although it's also worth noting that that page states: >Note: Since 1987, Stephen Wolfram's intellectual efforts have not primarily been reported in academic articles.
- Smaug123 7y ago
  This is true, but Wolfram was certainly a "normal" professional physicist for years before striking out on his own.

GuiA 7y ago

Well, his reasoning is sound enough - if his results are truly spectacular, it probably won’t matter that they weren’t published in peer reviewed venues. At the same time, turning boring results into something fit for publishing can be very time consuming - more than the research itself, and at the opportunity cost of attacking juicier problems. So if your goal is to utterly revolutionize a field, and you are very confident in your abilities to do so, it’s not the worst strategy in the world to just chase the ideas you’re most excited about and forgo the traditional bureaucratic paths.

shadowgovt 7y ago
I haven't been deeply plugged into Wolfram's breakthroughs since "A New Kind Of Science," but if memory serves I don't think he's discovered anything that offers insight in the physics world in the utility sense. By which I mean: progress in physics usually looks like finding a novel relationship between previously-thought-separate phenomena, an improvement on the mechanics of using an existing theory for predictive power, or a conceptual simplification of existing theory (i.e. a new theory that completely explains the known observable phenomena of the previous theory while shaking out Russell's teapots the previous theory held). I don't think Wolfram's work in the physics space on the cellular automata model has met any of these criteria, so it's not surprising he's not getting mainstrean publication traction. His CA model isn't bringing us novel relationships (yet; I hold out hope here), it isn't making it easier to do what we already do, it hasn't yielded any predictions that existing theories don't also yield, and it's certainly not simpler than field theory and relationship formulae that don't assume a CA. Until there's a breakthrough in one of those three categories that can't be done easily with one of the traditional mechanisms, Wolfram's doing the scientific equivalent of translating lingua franca physics into Klingon; not really wasted effort in that it can be valuable to see something from more than one point of view, but not something that anyone's gonna pay him for or devote their precious column-inches to.
- GuiA 7y ago
  I’ll let the next few hundred years judge how relevant or not his contribution to physics was. I don’t think anyone writing in 2020 has much sense of that.

ur-whale 7y ago

Sure, let's force one of the most creative dude of this century back into the rigid pen others are allowed to play in, just in case he does something crazy and interesting. What a lame idea, truly worthy of a mandarin.

sixo 7y ago
Aside: let's put "worthy of a mandarin" away forever
- Octopodes 7y ago
  I've never heard the expression before. Could someone explain its meaning please?
  - Synaesthesia 7y ago
    An official or bureaucrat, particularly one that is reactionary and secretive. Eg. American Power and The New Mandarins. (Book) I think it’s an important and relevant term.
  - ur-whale 7y ago
    >Could someone explain its meaning please? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(bureaucrat) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(bureaucrat)
GuiA 7y ago
The guy pretty much single handedly built a profitable company that enables him to pursue whatever research interests he want, and that’s been going for over 30 years. They hate him cause they ain’t him.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  So did a lot of other people who aren’t extreme narcissists. I think it’s reasonable to find someone’s work admirable and yet think they have terrible personalities. There is a line of thought were people should be judged by what they create rather than how they behave, but luckily not many subscribe to it. Not even grown-up Linus Torvalds subscribes to it.

undefined1 7y ago

N'ah. It's good that folks like Wolfram and Eric Weinstein are taking a different path. Sometimes that's what it takes for new breakthroughs to emerge. If nothing else it could spark new ideas or invigorate others to take bolder approaches and move outside their comfort zone.

hobofan 7y ago
What path is Eric Weinstein taking? I've heard about him for the first time yesterday, when a section of his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was linked, where he talked much too confidently about a subject he probably shouldn't.
- meowface 7y ago
  Which subject?
  - hobofan 7y ago
    He claimed that "all our laboratory mice are broken". Video links and discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/g0ioxq/if_it_is_true_that_laboratory_mice_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/g0ioxq/if_it_is_...
    - outlace 7y ago
      He's speaking on behalf of his brother Brett Weinstein, who is qualified to say such things.
      - hobofan 7y ago
        There are still so many things wrong in how he tells the story that it doesn't pass a basic smell test for me. - He omits that this study was from 2000, so quite some time ago. Given that the paper about that has 200+ citations, I would say that it got the eyeballs it deserved. He doesn't offer any recent evidence that indicate that this is still the case today. - The core claim he makes "all mice are broken" is a hyperbole that a lot of people will tell you is unsubstantiated. He makes it sound like all tests done on mice are flawed because of it. - "I called them up and they were not able to produce any records that they changed their breeding protocols" doesn't mean that they didn't change them in the 20 years that passed. It just means that they didn't produce them to some random person contacting them. I'm not as "surprised nobody is breaking this story" as he is.