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Stephen's work is intriguing. He wants a model to simulate space, time, matter and energy. Some desirable properties of such a system, from a layman perspective
by pacala 6y ago
Stephen's work is intriguing. He wants a model to simulate space, time, matter and energy. Some desirable properties of such a system, from a layman perspective:
1. The model must be fundamentally simple.
2. The model must be able to produce 'interesting' behaviors somehow.
3. The model must exhibit very puzzling behaviors like 'speed of light is a constant', 'space dilation' or 'quantum superposition'.
He observes that extremely simple rewrite systems, like the infamous rule 30, satisfy 1 and 2, under a provable universality result: all 'interesting' behaviors are Turing equivalent. He then observes that the succession of states of the system could be observed as 'time', that having the fundamental simulation substrate create new nodes on the fly could be observed as 'space dilation', that the speed of generating new nodes is a limiting factor in the same way the speed of light is and that having alternate rules applicable in a given configurations could be observed as 'superposition'. This sounds promising. Let's work out the details. To my layman understanding, it's a fundamentally different approach than what physicists have been doing, extremely successfully, in the past 100+ years.
So far, he's empty handed, and very far from concrete results. He's pioneering the exploration of this space by building the first generation of programming languages, the machine code. Maybe 50 later, someone will build ZFS / explain the '3 but not 4 particle generations', using ML to express their thought process.
He's put some thought in attempting to bridge graph rewrite systems to the Universe's behavior. No measurable results, but no [layman's] obvious way to refute either. https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/potential-relation-to-physics/ https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/potent...
- Nevermark 6y agoHe really isn't pioneering much though. He talks about graph automata like he invented them, or that he was the first to see that simple rules could generate very complex behavior. But he wasn't. I am not saying he hasn't done anything interesting, but it is actually hard to tell exactly where any original work begins, even for someone somewhat familiar with the area of computing related to graph transforms (me), because in his writing he implies he did so much more than he did. So it isn't clear where his contribution line starts. It rubs me so wrong I can't read anything he writes anymore. This may be one aspect of the negative reaction of some physicists too.
- pacala 6y agoThat is a fair criticism. The tone is off-putting. Partly because of the tone, I considered NKS a load of pointless drivel for 20 years. Yes, absolutely, he didn't invented graph automata. But he's the one willing to propose graph automata as a model of the Universe, and work out some technical details. Or, at least, he's building tooling to experiment with graph automata in this context such that someone else can work out technical details. Or fail to do so. Or fail to do so and prove this is a dead end. While I'm not familiar with what kind of graph transforms work is done these days, I would have hoped that if someone re-created some version of Lorenz transforms on top of graph transforms, I would have heard of it. The discussion would be more constructive, or destructive as a manner of speaking, if someone would point out that either Stephen is wrong, or old news, on the handful of technical points he is making. https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/potential-relation-to-physics/motion-and-special-relativity/ https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/potent...