If I can add a layman perspective to Jiggawatts excellent analysis - since there's a very similar issue happening in economics, it may be a bit more approachab

If I can add a layman perspective to Jiggawatts excellent analysis - since there's a very similar issue happening in economics, it may be a bit more approachable. Economics is also full of theories that try to explain the entire complex system from partial observations, and people arguing furiously with each other, in what for a large part in academia is a contrived nonsense that is practically useless for real world issues, and mainly serves signalling purposes. How this manifests itself there, is that they will take some time series of some kind of data - price of oil over a few years say - fit the equation of a straight line to it - and the less responsible ones then yell "solved". But if you took a longer portion of that data, went back several decades say, you would see that it is bouncing up and down like a yo-yo, and actually the only equation that is pretty much guaranteed not to fit it, is a straight line. Unless you take a short enough period. Or to put it another way, with a short enough ruler you can fit any curve. Wolfram, and his opponents, are essentially doing the same thing, only with multi-dimensional math, where the curve in question looks a bit more complex than a straight line, but fundamentally its the same thing. Which is why it matters much more than outsiders may appreciate that the model isn't an exact fit. Lurking behind all of this of course, is that one time in physics when the data and the theory were (within the limits of then technology) a pretty exact fit, and still the theory was completely wrong - epicycles.