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I'd love to see some great blog posts, talks, etc from people who disagree with this piece of research. There are lots of people who dislike him, great, I agre

I'd love to see some great blog posts, talks, etc from people who disagree with this piece of research. There are lots of people who dislike him, great, I agree, this is common knowledge, but it's not a reason that his research is wrong – the scientific community is better than ad-hominem attacks. The problem is that he's a pretty good science communicator. As a layperson (but software engineer so I'm somewhat mathematically literate and know what a graph is), I got through the intro talk published by them and came out feeling like I understood what the premise was, roughly how it worked, how it could apply, why it might be a good model. I then read a physicists "debunking", but because it was basically just references to physics papers saying "ah but you didn't address the something conjecture" I didn't really get anywhere with it. I'm glad the physics community are discussing it internally, that is ultimately more important, but as a layperson I'd really like to get a good understanding of the other side of the argument.

jiggawatts 7y ago
One issue with fundamental theories that I've seen is that it's really easy to come up with a model that reproduces some aspects of relativity or even quantum mechanics, especially in some approximation, such as low energies or weak fields. In that regime, you can wave your hand and pretend that everything is linear or nearly so. The symmetries are common symmetries that a lot of algebras or geometries share, so things just "seem to work" almost magically. This is like saying you've invented a car from scratch because you've made something with mirror symmetry that can roll forward. Obviously, this is missing more than a few details. What Stephen Wolfram seems to have done is come up with an extremely generic system that can describe anything, in much the same way that a CAD program can use meshes to describe any piece of machinery you'd like to design. That doesn't mean that meshes are equivalent to metal and concrete. Just because meshes can have various symmetries and can be used to represent circular things doesn't mean that a mesh is a car either. Similarly, in a very real sense the Universe performs computation, because -- duh -- it contains computers. And brains. And many things of that nature. Brains and computers run by the same rules of physics that stars and experimental particle beams do. Hence, the Universe computes. It also computes in the trivial sense that if you add 1 hydrogen atom to 1 hydrogen atom you get 2 hydrogen atoms. So if you come up with a very generic form of computation, such as automata, or substitution rules, or whatever, of course you're going to find many things that "look like" various aspects of the computation the Universe is performing. But analogies are just that: comparisons of vaguely similar features. That doesn't mean they're isomorphic to each other, nor does it mean that some random theory is actually the rules the Universe follows. Stephen spends a lot of his time jumping up and down and pointing at some trivial aspect of his theories and saying "Look at this! My theory can perform addition! The Universe does addition too! Hence my theory is the theory of the Universe!" I've been interested in the fundamental theory of everything for two decades now, and I spend about an hour a day on average poking through random arXiv papers looking for ideas or signs of progress. I've noticed a few things: Much of Wolfram's criticism of academia and modern theoretical physics is correct. It's much the same as Eric Weinstein's criticism. They both say that the politics and economics of academia make it nigh impossible to rock the boat and come up with radical new ideas. I noticed this too. Modern theoretical physics isn't. It's intellectual wankery and dick measuring as a way of getting pieces of paper and tenure. There's zero motivation or incentive to do anything useful, because the system has slowly evolved over time to disincentivize it. However, this doesn't mean that their particular "rebel" flavour of TOE is correct, just because the models produced by Universities have gone nowhere. Progress in some arbitrary direction is not necessarily better than no progress at all! Progress in the right direction is needed. Over the years (decades!) I've developed an acid test to quickly sort the wheat from the chaff: 1) Does the theory even mention particle generations? Bonus points if demonstrates at least three and explains why we haven't found four. 2) Is it a truly local theory in that global communication is never required? (Many current theories implicitly involve "solving" something, which is often implicitly a global minimisation.) 3) Can the theory be applied to single systems, or just ensembles? (Most QM theories automatically fail this one. Single particles exist, single electrons go into higher orbits from a single photon, etc... Either you can model this, or your theory is woefully incomplete) 4) Can it explain the observations of Quantum Mechanics without resorting to the "infinite dimensional" mathematical wizardry? Can it produce computable models, or just symbolic gibberish that I guarantee you no particle "computes" as it goes about its business. 5) Nobel prize winning stuff would explain the origins of constants that are currently experimentally determined inputs. (Most theories I've seen don't even have numbers.) 6) The ultimate requirement is for a TOE to "not only" produce the known observable physical behaviour but to also naturally exclude everything else. That is, the ideal rules should have some sort of incredibly tight self-consistency that can only happen in one way and can only produce physics. For example, an algebra that can only be used to represent valid combinations of particles and fields, and can never represent any other "invalid state" that makes no sense. Unfortunately, 99% of the stuff I see fail at all of the above. Wolfram's theory does too. His current graph-based theory and his previous cellular automaton theory spectacularly fail the 6-th requirement. They're both nearly unconstrained computation models with infinite flexibility, the exact opposite of a good TOE.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- danpalmer 7y ago
  From my understanding of where the research is at, I think you're asking too much of it, and rebutting it on that basis. My understanding is that it is being posited as a category of models, of which one could be the "theory of everything". They haven't said that one of them is, and they know they haven't found the one that is yet if there is one. I'm interested in discussions about why this type of model can't work, rather than people repeatedly pointing out that they haven't found the exact model yet, which seems to be a strawman argument. As for your 6 acid test elements, that's exactly the sort of thing I'd like to learn more about, but in the current wording I feel like I'm missing about a Phd's worth of understanding. I think communicating this in a more accessible form would be great! I understand that theoretical physicists have reasons why they don't like his theories, but I don't understand what those reasons are, whereas I do understand a bit about the theories. This makes it hard (as much as I want to) to be persuaded by physicists.
  - jiggawatts 7y ago
    To be a bit more concrete, this is a bit like saying "Computers could be used to simulate/represent physical theories, hence studying computers could lead to a theory of everything." That's not even wrong! Studying computation, computation systems, or even just mathematics in general almost certainly could assist with progress towards a TOE. That doesn't mean that pointing at a computer running a few dozen lines of code[1] and saying "A TOE could be in there... somewhere" is materially useful. [1] I'm paraphrasing Stephen himself here! Personally, I feel that if Stephen really wanted forward progress towards a TOE, he's uniquely positioned to do so. He controls a company that makes one of the best Computer Algebra Systems. He's in a position of power over a large, highly talented staff of mathematicians, and he could push Mathematica's features towards multiple relatively unexplored areas of computational mathematics where there isn't much available at the moment. Unfortunately, he's made the decision that the only two such areas worthy of his time and his company's resources are cellular automata and graph rewriting. Sigh. Meanwhile, he could have done added all sorts of features for things like handling Einstein summation convention, tensors, Geometric Algebra (and noncommutative algebras in general), topology, etc... Those would at least have immediate utility to working physicists, and if pushed to the extreme could maybe help uncover some fundamental theory somewhere. But nope. He likes to play with graphs, like a kid with with a Spirograph only interested in making pretty patterns.
lidHanteyk 7y ago
Wolfram's framework is unfalsifiable and contains no new explanatory power. That alone should be sufficient to show you why folks are so skeptical of the claims. Combined with the fact that he introduces new terminology and refuses peer review, this should give you reason to expect that there is a simpler, more canonical, already-explored branch of theoretical physics which covers the same stuff. I wish that you had linked to the material that you didn't "get anywhere with"; without it, it's hard to actually examine the quality of the underlying arguments. I found writeups like [0] which seem extremely well-argued; the formal ideas come from [1], and the core idea is Bell's theorem [2]: there is some essential non-locality to QM, we can experimentally see it, and so we can't just say "oh, it's all a big computer", even if it's a computer with interestingly high dimensionality or interconnections, without further justification. [0] https://www.singlelunch.com/2020/04/23/why-stephen-wolframs-research-program-is-a-dead-end/ https://www.singlelunch.com/2020/04/23/why-stephen-wolframs-... [1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
- danpalmer 7y ago
  When you say it's unfalsifiable and contains no new explanatory power, it would be great to dig into this. My understanding is that they are early on in the research so the lack of explanatory power feels... uninteresting at this stage? They have started to make predictions (such as the existence of lighter weight particles than electrons that still have mass), but in general it just feels like they're still too early to conclude that it's not falsifiable and has no explanatory power?
  - jordanpg 7y ago
    Well, it's fine that they are in the early stages, but Wolfram went ahead with a press bonanza to announce that he had solved physics without the corresponding predictions that would demonstrate it. That's why it's important to point out that it's not falsifiable and has no explanatory power at the moment. What he's doing is bad for science and does real harm, eroding the public understanding of how science actually works in favor of flashy headlines.
gameswithgo 7y ago
>The problem is that he's a pretty good science communicator. Disagree. I bought one of his books, Idea Makers, knowing that he is a bit a jerk/kooky, because it looked interesting. Every chapter about a different important scientist/thinker in history, what could go wrong? What went wrong was that actually every chapter was about Wolfram and/or Mathematica. He can't help himself! But, all that said, that doesn't mean he is wrong!
- cbm-vic-20 7y ago
  I've been to one of his talks, where the topic wasn't about him or Mathematica or "Wolfram Language". He talked a lot about himself and Wolfram Language. Seems like a pretty smart guy, though, and has built up a pretty impressive empire.
aklemm 7y ago
It's unrealistic and unfair to expect scientists/experts to do the hard work of debunking every crackpot that comes along. The crackpot needs to be more apparent and enticing if he wants to break through.
- danpalmer 7y ago
  Yeah I don't expect them to debunk every crackpot, but a large project with multiple people involved, the backing of a large company, and several papers submitted for peer review feels to me like it passes the bar of "worth engaging with".
  - aklemm 7y ago
    Maybe, but his track record is not great. If he's really got something, I'd think he could easily draw people into it rather than create skepticism. But I don't know much...
    - ricardobeat 7y ago
      He published a paper, asked for comments, and here we are saying he is a crackpot and should somehow 'draw people into it'. Seems like everyone is losing...
      - aklemm 7y ago
        Well, I'll bet anyone $100 he doesn't have a theory everything.
  - stared 7y ago
    If it gets through peer-review of reputable journals - then certainly yes. The burden of proof always rests on the one proposing a grand claim. But my bet*) is that if it gets accepted, then with severely reduced claims (not "theory of everything", but "We model X with Y, and were able to replicate Z1 in general and Z2 in low-energy limit. Further studies..."). Large company and many people involved, as of now, is the only reason why it gets some attention. Otherwise it would be buried as a PDF in "misc" section on one's academic website.
gaze 7y ago
"he's a pretty good science communicator" I'm a physics postdoc and can't understand what he writes. How good of a communicator can he possibly be?
- danpalmer 7y ago
  To be more accurate perhaps: He's pretty good at sounding like a good science communicator. For someone without a Phd in physics, this is unfortunately indistinguishable from actually being a good science communicator.
  - Viliam1234 7y ago
    In other words, he is good at impressing people who don't understand the topic; but the people who understand the topic remain completely unimpressed. The first part without the second one could mean "great communicator". The first part with the second one sounds more like "crackpot". It is easy to impress people when you have studied something longer than them. There are interesting ideas that are relatively simple to learn, so if you learn them and then explain them simply to other people, they are amazed. But it is possible to get some beginners' stuff right, and then get some advanced stuff wrong. And the laypeople who listen to you are impressed by the former, and cannot notice the flaws in the latter. Then you claim to have found answers to some expert-level questions, and your fans go like "this is pure genius, why doesn't academia build statues in his honor?" From my perspective, the part that impresses people is Wolfram pointing at a Turing-complete system (it used to be cellular automata, recently it is some graph transformations) and explaining what Turing-complete means. Which is fantastic if you never heard about Turing-complete systems before! Yes, in theory it could be used to simulate a universe, despite being such a simple thing. If this is news for you, it will completely blow your mind! On the other hand, if you studied computer science, you know that Turing-complete systems are a dime a dozen. For example, almost any programming language is Turing-complete. Yes, it is fascinating to find things that are way simpler than the usual programming language, and are still Turing-complete. But again, if you studied computer science, you already heard about a few of them, so learning that there is yet another one doesn't sound so revolutionary. At best, you may admire its elegance, but it's still only one specimen amongst many. So when Wolfram continues to explain how his currently favorite system could simulate the universe, you start yawning, because "being able in principle to simulate the universe as we know it" is a general property of Turing-complete systems. Yes, it is a property of Wolfram's current favorite system, but it is also a property of zillion other Turing-complete systems. There is no reason to single out this one specifically. You might as well talk about how the universe could in theory be simulated in PHP. Yes, it could, but without further evidence there is no reason to assume it really is. (In fact, it's even worse. If something is Turing-complete, not only it could simulate our universe, but also any other universe with completely different laws of physics. Therefore, despite the fact that our universe could be simulated in PHP, you can't really hope to discover anything relevant about our universe by studying PHP. A universe without gravity, or a universe where gravity is a repulsive force, could be simulated in PHP, too. This is why you cannot find useful information about gravity by studying what can be done in PHP.) ...so far, this was inside my field of expertise, which is computer science; now I am going to step outside of it and comment on physics... If I understand it correctly (and reading comments by people who know physics better than me suggest that I am roughly on the right track), the next step is Wolfram finding some vague analogies between some properties of his currently favorite Turing-complete systems, and the laws of physics as we know them. Like, if something grows, that is kinda like the expansion of universe; but if something shrinks, that is kinda like the relativistic contraction; and if two things are somehow connected to each other, that is kinda like the quantum entanglement. Maybe the actual analogies found by Wolfram are less lame than this, but ultimately they are just analogies, and probably sound equally lame to an expert in physics. Things kinda grow, but not in a way that would allow you to actually derive the equation for Lorentz contraction. They just grow, and that's it. If we wouldn't have the theory of relativity by now, you couldn't use this to invent it. It has no predictive power. First you must know the laws of physics, and only then you can search for something that is vaguely analogical to them. And it is this combined effect of "finding a simple system that is Turing-complete" and "finding some analogies between the system and the laws of physics" that creates the strong impression in laymen that Wolfram found something relevant to understanding our universe. "Hey, if it can be used to simulate the universe, and if we can find analogies with some laws of physics, why don't we just study it further and maybe we will find some new, hitherto unknown, laws of physics? Why is the academia not paying more attention?" The main problem is that the fact that it could simulate the universe actually means much less than how it sounds, and the analogies can only be found when you know what you are looking for, in other words only after the relevant laws of physics have been already discovered. EDIT: Looking at this discussion, you can find people who defend Wolfram because he sounds exciting, or because it feels unfair that his theories do not get the attention they supposedly deserve. Not a single person is defending him because he explained some law of physics correctly. And this is not an accident. As far as I know, the same thing happens outside Hacker News, too.
rwallace 7y ago
Does Wolfram's model correctly generate the many worlds of quantum mechanics? I get the impression that it doesn't, and I've seen it claimed that this has been mathematically demonstrated, but I can't say for sure. That includes variability in some things that are constant in our region of the universe. It's fine for everyday purposes for us to regard things like the ratio of masses of the particles or strengths of the forces as fundamental and given, but a truly fundamental theory needs to generate the entire landscape, possibly including variation in the number of extended dimensions of space. At the same time, there is a sense in which it's easy to do that: just use a universal Turing machine. A correct fundamental theory should generate something akin to the landscape of string theory, but at the same time not generate e.g. Conway's Game of Life. Is Wolfram's theory being evaluated on achieving that delicate balance between generating too little and too much?

jiggawatts 7y ago

One issue with fundamental theories that I've seen is that it's really easy to come up with a model that reproduces some aspects of relativity or even quantum mechanics, especially in some approximation, such as low energies or weak fields. In that regime, you can wave your hand and pretend that everything is linear or nearly so. The symmetries are common symmetries that a lot of algebras or geometries share, so things just "seem to work" almost magically. This is like saying you've invented a car from scratch because you've made something with mirror symmetry that can roll forward. Obviously, this is missing more than a few details. What Stephen Wolfram seems to have done is come up with an extremely generic system that can describe anything, in much the same way that a CAD program can use meshes to describe any piece of machinery you'd like to design. That doesn't mean that meshes are equivalent to metal and concrete. Just because meshes can have various symmetries and can be used to represent circular things doesn't mean that a mesh is a car either. Similarly, in a very real sense the Universe performs computation, because -- duh -- it contains computers. And brains. And many things of that nature. Brains and computers run by the same rules of physics that stars and experimental particle beams do. Hence, the Universe computes. It also computes in the trivial sense that if you add 1 hydrogen atom to 1 hydrogen atom you get 2 hydrogen atoms. So if you come up with a very generic form of computation, such as automata, or substitution rules, or whatever, of course you're going to find many things that "look like" various aspects of the computation the Universe is performing. But analogies are just that: comparisons of vaguely similar features. That doesn't mean they're isomorphic to each other, nor does it mean that some random theory is actually the rules the Universe follows. Stephen spends a lot of his time jumping up and down and pointing at some trivial aspect of his theories and saying "Look at this! My theory can perform addition! The Universe does addition too! Hence my theory is the theory of the Universe!" I've been interested in the fundamental theory of everything for two decades now, and I spend about an hour a day on average poking through random arXiv papers looking for ideas or signs of progress. I've noticed a few things: Much of Wolfram's criticism of academia and modern theoretical physics is correct. It's much the same as Eric Weinstein's criticism. They both say that the politics and economics of academia make it nigh impossible to rock the boat and come up with radical new ideas. I noticed this too. Modern theoretical physics isn't. It's intellectual wankery and dick measuring as a way of getting pieces of paper and tenure. There's zero motivation or incentive to do anything useful, because the system has slowly evolved over time to disincentivize it. However, this doesn't mean that their particular "rebel" flavour of TOE is correct, just because the models produced by Universities have gone nowhere. Progress in some arbitrary direction is not necessarily better than no progress at all! Progress in the right direction is needed. Over the years (decades!) I've developed an acid test to quickly sort the wheat from the chaff: 1) Does the theory even mention particle generations? Bonus points if demonstrates at least three and explains why we haven't found four. 2) Is it a truly local theory in that global communication is never required? (Many current theories implicitly involve "solving" something, which is often implicitly a global minimisation.) 3) Can the theory be applied to single systems, or just ensembles? (Most QM theories automatically fail this one. Single particles exist, single electrons go into higher orbits from a single photon, etc... Either you can model this, or your theory is woefully incomplete) 4) Can it explain the observations of Quantum Mechanics without resorting to the "infinite dimensional" mathematical wizardry? Can it produce computable models, or just symbolic gibberish that I guarantee you no particle "computes" as it goes about its business. 5) Nobel prize winning stuff would explain the origins of constants that are currently experimentally determined inputs. (Most theories I've seen don't even have numbers.) 6) The ultimate requirement is for a TOE to "not only" produce the known observable physical behaviour but to also naturally exclude everything else. That is, the ideal rules should have some sort of incredibly tight self-consistency that can only happen in one way and can only produce physics. For example, an algebra that can only be used to represent valid combinations of particles and fields, and can never represent any other "invalid state" that makes no sense. Unfortunately, 99% of the stuff I see fail at all of the above. Wolfram's theory does too. His current graph-based theory and his previous cellular automaton theory spectacularly fail the 6-th requirement. They're both nearly unconstrained computation models with infinite flexibility, the exact opposite of a good TOE.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
danpalmer 7y ago
From my understanding of where the research is at, I think you're asking too much of it, and rebutting it on that basis. My understanding is that it is being posited as a category of models, of which one could be the "theory of everything". They haven't said that one of them is, and they know they haven't found the one that is yet if there is one. I'm interested in discussions about why this type of model can't work, rather than people repeatedly pointing out that they haven't found the exact model yet, which seems to be a strawman argument. As for your 6 acid test elements, that's exactly the sort of thing I'd like to learn more about, but in the current wording I feel like I'm missing about a Phd's worth of understanding. I think communicating this in a more accessible form would be great! I understand that theoretical physicists have reasons why they don't like his theories, but I don't understand what those reasons are, whereas I do understand a bit about the theories. This makes it hard (as much as I want to) to be persuaded by physicists.
- jiggawatts 7y ago
  To be a bit more concrete, this is a bit like saying "Computers could be used to simulate/represent physical theories, hence studying computers could lead to a theory of everything." That's not even wrong! Studying computation, computation systems, or even just mathematics in general almost certainly could assist with progress towards a TOE. That doesn't mean that pointing at a computer running a few dozen lines of code[1] and saying "A TOE could be in there... somewhere" is materially useful. [1] I'm paraphrasing Stephen himself here! Personally, I feel that if Stephen really wanted forward progress towards a TOE, he's uniquely positioned to do so. He controls a company that makes one of the best Computer Algebra Systems. He's in a position of power over a large, highly talented staff of mathematicians, and he could push Mathematica's features towards multiple relatively unexplored areas of computational mathematics where there isn't much available at the moment. Unfortunately, he's made the decision that the only two such areas worthy of his time and his company's resources are cellular automata and graph rewriting. Sigh. Meanwhile, he could have done added all sorts of features for things like handling Einstein summation convention, tensors, Geometric Algebra (and noncommutative algebras in general), topology, etc... Those would at least have immediate utility to working physicists, and if pushed to the extreme could maybe help uncover some fundamental theory somewhere. But nope. He likes to play with graphs, like a kid with with a Spirograph only interested in making pretty patterns.

lidHanteyk 7y ago

Wolfram's framework is unfalsifiable and contains no new explanatory power. That alone should be sufficient to show you why folks are so skeptical of the claims. Combined with the fact that he introduces new terminology and refuses peer review, this should give you reason to expect that there is a simpler, more canonical, already-explored branch of theoretical physics which covers the same stuff. I wish that you had linked to the material that you didn't "get anywhere with"; without it, it's hard to actually examine the quality of the underlying arguments. I found writeups like [0] which seem extremely well-argued; the formal ideas come from [1], and the core idea is Bell's theorem [2]: there is some essential non-locality to QM, we can experimentally see it, and so we can't just say "oh, it's all a big computer", even if it's a computer with interestingly high dimensionality or interconnections, without further justification. [0] https://www.singlelunch.com/2020/04/23/why-stephen-wolframs-research-program-is-a-dead-end/ https://www.singlelunch.com/2020/04/23/why-stephen-wolframs-... [1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

danpalmer 7y ago
When you say it's unfalsifiable and contains no new explanatory power, it would be great to dig into this. My understanding is that they are early on in the research so the lack of explanatory power feels... uninteresting at this stage? They have started to make predictions (such as the existence of lighter weight particles than electrons that still have mass), but in general it just feels like they're still too early to conclude that it's not falsifiable and has no explanatory power?
- jordanpg 7y ago
  Well, it's fine that they are in the early stages, but Wolfram went ahead with a press bonanza to announce that he had solved physics without the corresponding predictions that would demonstrate it. That's why it's important to point out that it's not falsifiable and has no explanatory power at the moment. What he's doing is bad for science and does real harm, eroding the public understanding of how science actually works in favor of flashy headlines.

gameswithgo 7y ago

>The problem is that he's a pretty good science communicator. Disagree. I bought one of his books, Idea Makers, knowing that he is a bit a jerk/kooky, because it looked interesting. Every chapter about a different important scientist/thinker in history, what could go wrong? What went wrong was that actually every chapter was about Wolfram and/or Mathematica. He can't help himself! But, all that said, that doesn't mean he is wrong!

cbm-vic-20 7y ago
I've been to one of his talks, where the topic wasn't about him or Mathematica or "Wolfram Language". He talked a lot about himself and Wolfram Language. Seems like a pretty smart guy, though, and has built up a pretty impressive empire.

aklemm 7y ago

It's unrealistic and unfair to expect scientists/experts to do the hard work of debunking every crackpot that comes along. The crackpot needs to be more apparent and enticing if he wants to break through.

danpalmer 7y ago
Yeah I don't expect them to debunk every crackpot, but a large project with multiple people involved, the backing of a large company, and several papers submitted for peer review feels to me like it passes the bar of "worth engaging with".
- aklemm 7y ago
  Maybe, but his track record is not great. If he's really got something, I'd think he could easily draw people into it rather than create skepticism. But I don't know much...
  - ricardobeat 7y ago
    He published a paper, asked for comments, and here we are saying he is a crackpot and should somehow 'draw people into it'. Seems like everyone is losing...
    - aklemm 7y ago
      Well, I'll bet anyone $100 he doesn't have a theory everything.
- stared 7y ago
  If it gets through peer-review of reputable journals - then certainly yes. The burden of proof always rests on the one proposing a grand claim. But my bet*) is that if it gets accepted, then with severely reduced claims (not "theory of everything", but "We model X with Y, and were able to replicate Z1 in general and Z2 in low-energy limit. Further studies..."). Large company and many people involved, as of now, is the only reason why it gets some attention. Otherwise it would be buried as a PDF in "misc" section on one's academic website.

gaze 7y ago

"he's a pretty good science communicator" I'm a physics postdoc and can't understand what he writes. How good of a communicator can he possibly be?

danpalmer 7y ago
To be more accurate perhaps: He's pretty good at sounding like a good science communicator. For someone without a Phd in physics, this is unfortunately indistinguishable from actually being a good science communicator.
- Viliam1234 7y ago
  In other words, he is good at impressing people who don't understand the topic; but the people who understand the topic remain completely unimpressed. The first part without the second one could mean "great communicator". The first part with the second one sounds more like "crackpot". It is easy to impress people when you have studied something longer than them. There are interesting ideas that are relatively simple to learn, so if you learn them and then explain them simply to other people, they are amazed. But it is possible to get some beginners' stuff right, and then get some advanced stuff wrong. And the laypeople who listen to you are impressed by the former, and cannot notice the flaws in the latter. Then you claim to have found answers to some expert-level questions, and your fans go like "this is pure genius, why doesn't academia build statues in his honor?" From my perspective, the part that impresses people is Wolfram pointing at a Turing-complete system (it used to be cellular automata, recently it is some graph transformations) and explaining what Turing-complete means. Which is fantastic if you never heard about Turing-complete systems before! Yes, in theory it could be used to simulate a universe, despite being such a simple thing. If this is news for you, it will completely blow your mind! On the other hand, if you studied computer science, you know that Turing-complete systems are a dime a dozen. For example, almost any programming language is Turing-complete. Yes, it is fascinating to find things that are way simpler than the usual programming language, and are still Turing-complete. But again, if you studied computer science, you already heard about a few of them, so learning that there is yet another one doesn't sound so revolutionary. At best, you may admire its elegance, but it's still only one specimen amongst many. So when Wolfram continues to explain how his currently favorite system could simulate the universe, you start yawning, because "being able in principle to simulate the universe as we know it" is a general property of Turing-complete systems. Yes, it is a property of Wolfram's current favorite system, but it is also a property of zillion other Turing-complete systems. There is no reason to single out this one specifically. You might as well talk about how the universe could in theory be simulated in PHP. Yes, it could, but without further evidence there is no reason to assume it really is. (In fact, it's even worse. If something is Turing-complete, not only it could simulate our universe, but also any other universe with completely different laws of physics. Therefore, despite the fact that our universe could be simulated in PHP, you can't really hope to discover anything relevant about our universe by studying PHP. A universe without gravity, or a universe where gravity is a repulsive force, could be simulated in PHP, too. This is why you cannot find useful information about gravity by studying what can be done in PHP.) ...so far, this was inside my field of expertise, which is computer science; now I am going to step outside of it and comment on physics... If I understand it correctly (and reading comments by people who know physics better than me suggest that I am roughly on the right track), the next step is Wolfram finding some vague analogies between some properties of his currently favorite Turing-complete systems, and the laws of physics as we know them. Like, if something grows, that is kinda like the expansion of universe; but if something shrinks, that is kinda like the relativistic contraction; and if two things are somehow connected to each other, that is kinda like the quantum entanglement. Maybe the actual analogies found by Wolfram are less lame than this, but ultimately they are just analogies, and probably sound equally lame to an expert in physics. Things kinda grow, but not in a way that would allow you to actually derive the equation for Lorentz contraction. They just grow, and that's it. If we wouldn't have the theory of relativity by now, you couldn't use this to invent it. It has no predictive power. First you must know the laws of physics, and only then you can search for something that is vaguely analogical to them. And it is this combined effect of "finding a simple system that is Turing-complete" and "finding some analogies between the system and the laws of physics" that creates the strong impression in laymen that Wolfram found something relevant to understanding our universe. "Hey, if it can be used to simulate the universe, and if we can find analogies with some laws of physics, why don't we just study it further and maybe we will find some new, hitherto unknown, laws of physics? Why is the academia not paying more attention?" The main problem is that the fact that it could simulate the universe actually means much less than how it sounds, and the analogies can only be found when you know what you are looking for, in other words only after the relevant laws of physics have been already discovered. EDIT: Looking at this discussion, you can find people who defend Wolfram because he sounds exciting, or because it feels unfair that his theories do not get the attention they supposedly deserve. Not a single person is defending him because he explained some law of physics correctly. And this is not an accident. As far as I know, the same thing happens outside Hacker News, too.

rwallace 7y ago

Does Wolfram's model correctly generate the many worlds of quantum mechanics? I get the impression that it doesn't, and I've seen it claimed that this has been mathematically demonstrated, but I can't say for sure. That includes variability in some things that are constant in our region of the universe. It's fine for everyday purposes for us to regard things like the ratio of masses of the particles or strengths of the forces as fundamental and given, but a truly fundamental theory needs to generate the entire landscape, possibly including variation in the number of extended dimensions of space. At the same time, there is a sense in which it's easy to do that: just use a universal Turing machine. A correct fundamental theory should generate something akin to the landscape of string theory, but at the same time not generate e.g. Conway's Game of Life. Is Wolfram's theory being evaluated on achieving that delicate balance between generating too little and too much?