4 ms·

A very Stephen Wolfram article. As usual, if you assume all his unproven priors (ie, reality is actually a hypergraph with well defined update rules, the hyperg

• prionassembly 6y ago
  I think he's content with this reputation; also independently wealthy and not taking public funds or seats in academia. I say the future generations will be better off for Wolfram having gone down his rabbit holes.
  • mnemonicsloth 6y ago
    Right. Except for all the times he's claimed credit for others' work. And his wikipedia page has been thoroughly whitewashed, which suggests he is not content with the reputation he deserves.
• czbond 6y ago
  But is still worth noting. Science tends to be pretty rigid, and often dismissive of outlandish theories because participants in the field are too close to 'socially accepted facts'. Which as we know from human existence - humans have small minds due to social conformity.....
  • mellosouls 6y ago
    It's not worth noting - because we also know that almost all theories of this ilk tend to be dismissed because they break the laws of physics.
    • czbond 6y ago
      Mind expanding ideas are - because they help the mind to make connections in the future in which they involved. The field of science contains numerous personality types, some of which are creative, some of which are analytical. It is often worth the analytical (who must see data) to entertain those with creativity or intuition to make the jump - since often data does not lead to leap insights. Incremental science happens because of data; leap science happens because of creativity and intuition to explore the areas data hasn't 'gapped to'. And it is the difference when 'the data does not yet lead there, so we can't think there' that I refer to for social conformity.
      • mellosouls 6y ago
        Non conformity is used as an excuse by cranks to justify their lack of academic groundwork and resulting acceptance. Once in a blue moon one of these outsiders turns up something genuinely impressive. There is no reason whatsoever to assume that is the case here.
    • jlokier 6y ago
      > almost all theories of this ilk tend to be dismissed because they break the laws of physics. Actually no. Theories of this ilk which demonstrate their consistency with laws of physics to the level of observations already made and significantly beyond, tend to end up studied more, by more people. Especially ones that take an unusual angle, and end up deriving existing laws of physics almost as a surprising side effect. It suggests a useful insight. Even better if they take an unusual angle, predict some differences from assumed existing laws but only in unusual circumstances nobody has tried to observe so far, and are consistent with those laws in areas already observed. Or ones which explain existing laws better than current explanations. Notably the inconsistencies between general relativity and quantum mechanics mean that anything which can explain both at the same time and give correct answers to both is quite interesting. The ones that get dismissed quickly are those which aren't consistent with laws of physics that are already assumed, especially at the level of existing observations.
      • mellosouls 6y ago
  • throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    I'd like to know if you can give some evidence in the past (say) 20 years that science has discarded or delayed acceptance of a good theory because of 'social conformity'.
    • czbond 6y ago
      I'm talking at the individual level - humans are socially pressured to conform to their field of study current beliefs (in any field). It takes long periods of time for ideas that go against the grain to bubble up to become 'mass conscious' within a field. Especially in areas requiring higher mathematics where practitioners can feel inferior.
      • throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
        Which I'm saying I don't believe. Show me recent examples where it happened, I asked. > Especially in areas requiring higher mathematics I just don't recognise this at all. Why do you say this? The journals are full of new discoveries, my experience with mathematicians is they're a very open and accommodating bunch (ok, it's not my field, but still)
    • BadThink6655321 6y ago
      See the <a href=“ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment”>Millikan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment”>Millika... Oil Drop Experiment</a>, particularly the section “ Millikan's experiment as an example of psychological effects in scientific methodology”
      • throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
        Interesting, I'll have a careful read of that but I must point out it was from 90 years ago, a bit outside my stated margin!
      • saagarjha 6y ago
        Fixed link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's_experiment_as_an_example_of_psychological_effects_in_scientific_methodology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...
• uoaei 6y ago
  This comment displays yet again the conflation between "exploratory model" and "explanatory model". This model does not purport (in its current iteration) to explain material reality. It purports to generate a theory of physics without going so far as to claim that that theory coincides with the dynamics of our universe specifically. It is taking the idea of "physical model" and abstracting it to see how flexible of a theoretical substrate can be used to demonstrate certain behaviors within the defined set of axioms which we would expect out of any model of physics, i.e., causality, limits of information propagation rates, etc. In short: it is not a theory of the physics, but just a physics.
  • throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    > but just a physics Without modelling the real world, and in describing it's own rules, I think you might better describe it as a branch of mathematics, and not a physics, no?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • l33tman 6y ago
      Superstring theory is considered a branch of physics but it's in a similar position (not saying there's anything of value in the wolfram article, just saying sometimes purely theoretical frameworks can be called physics even though they have not reached a predictive or even postdictive state yet)
  • WJW 6y ago
    Are you sure? Because https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h... definitely implies that he believes his "hypergraph with update rules" model is how the universe actually works and what remains is to find the particular structure and update rules that describe our own universe. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a very interesting model that is quite flexible and could be used for a great many things. But if we're moving the goalposts from "can we go faster than the speed of light in our own universe" to "can we go faster than the speed of light in a universe I constructed from arbitrary rules" then the result becomes much less interesting.
• krick 6y ago
  > redefinition of the speed of light as the speed of causality Since when this is redefinition? As far as I understand, this was always the definition. In fact, calling it the speed of light was always a bit misleading, since, first off, actual speed of light depends on environment, and second, there is nothing really special about light. It's just under ideal circumstances it can propagate with the maximum possible speed, i.e. the speed of causality. Light isn't fundamental for the laws of physics, causality is.
  • cthalupa 6y ago
    You’re correct. The speed of light is not actually about light. https://youtu.be/msVuCEs8Ydo https://youtu.be/msVuCEs8Ydo has a great explanation from the always excellent PBS Space Time, for the curious.
• pa7x1 6y ago
  Haven't read the article yet, so I don't judge the merits of his proposal, but unproven priors is exactly how science is built. A scientific hypothesis is taken without proof, then you derive its consequences and try to falsify them. What Wolfram has to do is to replicate known physics at a minimum and ideally derive new testable predictions that we can attempt to falsify. If he does that his unproven priors will become the new "taken for granted" priors.
  • WJW 6y ago
    That would be nice and he mentions that he can already replicate a few of the observed effects from relativity. But my point was exactly that he has (so far) not generated any testable predictions. I'd love it if he did.
    • BadThink6655321 6y ago
      What do we do with a theory that conforms to every measurement ever made, but whose predictions aren’t testable? After all, we’re already there. We’ll never measure the interior of a black hole, for example. I think our theory selection criteria needs work.
      • rbanffy 6y ago
        > but whose predictions aren’t testable? Until we can test it, we should avoid calling it a theory. In the meantime develop it until we can test it. We continue observing until we find something that isn't quite right.
      • outworlder 6y ago
        > We’ll never measure the interior of a black hole, for example Don't say 'never'. You can say we are pretty confident that the interior of black holes can't be measured now or in the future, given our current understanding. But science is not made of absolutes. > What do we do with a theory that conforms to every measurement ever made, but whose predictions aren’t testable Then it's kinda worthless, at last for physics. If two explanations agree with all observations (so far) that means they are completely interchangeable. You might as well use Occam's Razor and pick the simplest one. Until such time we find experimental differences, then we can compare again.
• criddell 6y ago
  > if you assume all his unproven priors (ie, reality is actually a hypergraph [...] What's the mainstream theory for what reality actually is?
  • piannucci 6y ago
    The mainstream theory is that whatever reality is, its consequences on measurable length-scales are as-yet indistinguishable from an almost-everywhere-continuous medium. (I.e. away from black hole singularities.). Until we have the ability to measure not just deviations of reality from theory, but deviations from what any continuum theory might predict, the question of whether hypergraphs have the correct asymptotic continuum behavior is largely moot. Wolfram has been pushing an atomistic program of cellular automata as models of physical systems for many years. They are beautiful, but so far they are only useful insofar as they approximate continuum mechanics-- which is to say, they are of limited application. The thing about continuous media is that they involve dynamics on all length scales: .1 meters, .1 nanometers, 1e-10 nm, etc. Because of wave-particle duality, length scales and energy scales run inversely: a low energy experiment just does not exhibit any measurable dependence on extremely short-range behavior of the universe. Only high-energy experiments have a wavelength short enough to be sensitive to this unknown sector. Low energy physics is “well understood” in the sense that any experiment with a modest number of component particles can be totally predicted from theory, to the limits of experimental accuracy. Granted that many real-world problems involve stupendous numbers of particles, and exhibit challenging-to-explain emergent behavior: but this is not evidence of unexplained fundamental phenomena, just of the limits of our mathematical insight into finding good abstractions for many-body problems, and evidence of the limits of our computational power to try and work around the lack of good abstractions. It is known that the most generous interpretation of current theories is that they are self-consistent to arbitrary high energies (renormalizable is the term). That does not mean they are consistent with actual reality, just with themselves. So... hypergraphs are a big lift, an unneeded multiplication of entities. Until an experiment reveals non-continuum behavior of space-time, what we have here is a solution to a non-issue.
    • dblack12705 6y ago
• JPLeRouzic 6y ago
  Perhaps Stephen Wolfram's theory is comparable to Maxwell's theory and we need a modern Oliver Heaviside to make it more palatable. (I am a layman)
• edem 6y ago
  Wait a second. We already know (since Einstein) that the speed of light is in fact the speed of causality.
• jlokier 6y ago
  All fundamental theoretical physics starts by building a model idea and exploring what the possible consequences are in a mathematical way. The goal is to model the real world, but it's far too difficult to go straight from a fundamental model up to the world observations to find out if the model works. Doing that "work out the consequences" work can take decades, and a lot of people. So models are built, explored, their consequences worked out, and if they match something interesting in other more well-established theories, then the models are looked at with more interest and developed further. If not, the models are tweaked or thrown away. You could call it a branch of mathematics, but in a sense all theoretical physics starts out that way, so we just call it theoretical physics when the goal is to model observed reality while providing a useful underlying model. Browse the papers on arXiv.org or any theoretical physics journal and there's a lot of exploratory model-building like this. It's very common. Graph-space models are also not unique to Stephen Wolfram. Several physicists (paid ones) are exploring these models as an approach to reconciling relativity and quantum physics. In a sense, this is what deriving from observation looks like: We've observed relativity and quantum, and we still haven't figured out how to understand the logical consequences of both together, so exploring theoretical underlying models like this is necessary to understand current observations. The article's theory is not "philosophical" or "metaphysical" theory where nothing can be tested in principle. He explicitly talks about measurable effects differing from other models, albeit with many difficulties and potential intractibility due to computational limits. But the point is there are, in principle, observable differences, making it more than just a metaphysical model, and if it's intractable to access them we can't figure that out without studying the model further. Even if we can't, there not being able to may have consequences as well (like the way the Heisenberg uncertainty principle turns out to have logical consequences, not just preventing measurements).