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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 th

by m12k 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.

by m12k 7y ago

jonathan_gorard 7y 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 7y 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.