17 ms·
The Wolfram Physics Project: A One-Year Update
- d_silin 6y agoTL; DR: almost nothing of substance. Some hard numbers out, but experimental predictions not feasible wth present technology level.
- iandanforth 6y agoI'm always amazed at how many words he can use to say so little.
- ganafagol 6y agoStephen Wolfram seems to be suffering from a mix of selection bias, confirmation bias and the problem that he overhyped his claims and his self-praise so heavily over the years that there is no way he could ever back down and say that something he invented does not make sense. His only path forward is to stick to what he is claiming, no matter what. And that's a pretty unhealthy place to be in. And it's also a deeply unscientific place. The option to be wrong and change course is at the heart of true scientific inquiry.
- artemonster 6y ago"We’ve been steadily understanding more and more about the structure and implications of our models—and they continue to fit beautifully with what we already know about physics, particularly connecting with some of the most elegant existing approaches, strengthening and extending them" Until his "theory" makes a single experimentally verifyable prediction, all of this are just empty words of a deliusional pseudoscientist that thinks too much of himself.
- orange3xchicken 6y agoNot necessarily for or against the work, but it's not just him working on this project solo like some mad scientist. There are a couple of other members on his team with academic publication histories as well.
- bostonsre 6y agoHas anyone found anything glaringly wrong with his proposals so far? It's all way over my head, but if he honestly believes in his quest and there is nothing overwhelmingly wrong with his assertions, is there much harm in letting him keep going down the path he's on? I could be wrong, but he doesn't seem to be a huckster selling cold fusion-like methodology to get rich. It definitely seems like he could probably express more humility in his statements, but I think people exploring seemingly crazy ideas shouldn't be shouted down or denigrated into giving up that exploration. The world would be a much lamer place and humanity wouldn't be as far as we are now technologically without people exploring out of the box ideas.
- gen220 6y agoI think people are less concerned about his research, and more about the media machine around his research. It comes off as if he’s puffing up a lot of smoke, in lieu of a flame. To make a comparison that a lot of people use to justify fringe research, Einstein came up with general relativity mostly by himself, and it was a fringe concept, but it came with a set of predictions that could be verified with observation. Eventually those predictions were tested, and his idea “won”. Until Wolfram’s ideas come bundled with refutable predictions that deviate from the standard model, it’s a smoke without a fire. To restate the comparison, Einstein wasn’t writing pamphlets, going on speaking tours, or writing books about his “universal laws” for years before actually presenting the idea in a refutable form. Einstein waited until he saw flames, to raise the smoke alarm, I’d that makes sense. Wolfram has been raising the smoke alarm for a while, but not providing any images of the fire. It’s not a very good look, IMO, but reasonable people can disagree.
- patcon 6y ago> Until Wolfram’s ideas come bundled with refutable predictions that deviate from the standard model, it’s a smoke without a fire. I thought his goal was a sort of parallel reconstruction (to unnecessarily abuse a shady law enforcement term), and so I'm not sure the above captures goals well...? Disclosure: biochemist and technologist who happens to get a kick out of Wolfram's meanderings.
- petermcneeley 6y ago"We’re still not sure about the answer, but the preliminary indication is that at least at a formal level, quantum computers aren’t going to come out ahead. " This sounds moderately close to a prediction.
- panda-giddiness 6y agoThat sounds more like cold reading than a prediction.
- ravi-delia 6y ago> Until his "theory" makes a single experimentally verifyable prediction, all of this are just empty words of a deliusional pseudoscientist that thinks too much of himself. Hey, we give string theorists tenure! But for real, while it doesn't seem like this is going anywhere, I'm not sure I wouldn't be convinced by something similar that was. If I walked out of my room with a set of equations that made few additional assumptions and allowed for derivation of both relativistic and quantum equations, it kind of seems like that would be good evidence. Like even if all the predictions are the same as those two systems, the fact that it's much simpler would give it Occam's approval. Now would such a single simple system fail to make new predictions? Probably not. There are holes in our understanding, and a unified theory couldn't really be simple and still tiptoe around those holes. But in the hypothetical scenario that there really was a simpler model with the same predictions, I wouldn't be opposed to it.
- georgeecollins 6y agoBut he makes pretty books! The CTO gave me his copy of a "New Kind of Science". I don't know why. It sat on my office shelf for years, hopefully convincing a few people that I was thoughtful and intelligent. It sure looked good, inside and out.
- ahelwer 6y agoWhy is there forever the assumption that the universe is governed by a simple set of rules? What if the universe is actually an enormous java program with a 10,000 line Utils.java file? Also this part definitely conjures up a certain series of sci-fi novels popular on HN (and elsewhere): "So one of the unexpected implications of our models is that there can be dimension fluctuations in our universe. And in fact it seems likely that our universe started essentially infinite-dimensional, only gradually “cooling” to become basically three-dimensional. And though we haven’t yet worked it out, we expect there’ll be a “dimension-changing cosmology” that may well have definite predictions for the observed large-scale structure of our universe." Dimensional warfare, baby! Anyway Wolfram gets a lot of hate but honestly I'm glad that some smart dude is using his financially-independent time to go on wild theoretical excursions into what interests him. Living the dream.
- quux 6y agoSounds like he read "Death's End" by Liu Cixin and got inspired.
- _Microft 6y agoIs that the book where aliens forget to fold some dimensions while engineering something and it then rains superstrings onto a planet or something like that?
- ebruchez 6y agoThey do some folding, but I don't remember the "raining superstrings" part. In any case, it's an incredible trilogy. I loved it and I recommend it.
- Karsteski 6y agoI second this. A Remembrance of Earth's Past is one of the best SciFi series I have ever read. I even reread it a year later, and now a few months after that I wish I had time to reread it again. I got my girlfriend, mother and many friends to read the series as well :)
- throwawaysea 6y agoI think I am not qualified enough to really understand this very long article and the abstract concepts it discusses. However, it sets off my BS detectors. Is this article written by Wolfram himself? It doesn't have a clear indication of the author, but presumably it is him because there are parts of the article using the word "I". Wolfram has long been obsessed with computational models to explain the physical world. You could say this was his goal in A New Kind of Science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science). Personally I found that book's title and premise to be arrogant, since cellular automata are pretty simplistic and seem more like a curious novelty rather than a game-changing piece of science. This article repeatedly mentions a "machine code" for the universe. What does that mean? Does he simply mean that computational power and advancements in machine learning allow us to model physical phenomenon better and to understand how complex ideas are actually emergent behaviors arising from some fundamental pieces we already know about? It seems like that's the type of exploration performed in other articles, such as the one on consciousness (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/03/what-is-consciousness-some-new-perspectives-from-our-physics-project/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/03/what-is-consciou...). But I find it strange to see such explorations mixed in with what feels like marketing for the Wolfram language in here. Regardless - ultimately, what Wolfram is promising when he uses phrases like "a truly fundamental theory of physics", is a Grand Unified Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory). I am not certain that he's found it, because I feel his past works suffer from delusions of grandeur, and also because I don't think humans have all the necessary inputs/data/sensors to actually characterize the universe fully (for example what is dark matter). Without those pieces, how do we know that what we have is "truly fundamental" versus just another emergent layer on top of some more fundamental piece? Or maybe I am wrong and there is lurking genius in all these words and someone smarter than me or someone with more time will see it more readily.
- ska 6y agoWolfram has been banging this drum and self-promoting for approximately ever (see also his similarly badly-in-need-of-an-editor book "A New Kind Of Science", which generated plenty of commentary see http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html). He's is own worst enemy in many ways, as he undermines some actually interesting work with an outsider complex, a pathological need to self-aggrandize and a tendency to claim others work as his own.
- agentdrek 6y ago"When I first started developing what people have been calling “Wolfram models”, ..." I am just so put off by Wolfram's puffed up, bafflegab riddled and pompous writing "style" ... I feel like I must be missing something though?
- ska 6y ago> what people have been calling “Wolfram models”, ..." It does make one wonder if "people" means "my employees, on pain of firing"
- romwell 6y agoNah, it probably means Stephen Wolfram
- gameswithgo 6y agoHe is uniquely self centered, its beyond what any writer would create even for a caricature of a character.
- king_magic 6y agoWolfram has the air of a crackpot. A really, really, really smart one who has been successful, but a crackpot nonetheless. I just flag any Wolfram content I see here these days.
- ur-whale 6y ago> am just so put off by Wolfram's puffed up, bafflegab This is basically the definition of an ad hominem. He may be an asshole, but so were many other great scientists (Newton comes to mind). That does not have any correlation to the value of the work.
- leephillips 6y agoI thought the definition was judging the validity of an argument based on who is making it, not just saying that somebody puts you off. If he had said that Wolfram’s theory is wrong because Wolfram is an ass, that would have been ad hominem.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aaron-santos 6y agoCongrats on Stephen for f[i/ou]nding a substrate that he likes to spend his time in. In the meantime, can this theory reproduce or derive something as simple a CKM-matrix?
- nicklecompte 6y agoThe problem with his theory is that it probably can! But it doesn’t mean anything. To me it seems like his entire exercise is akin to re-inventing mathematical physics with, say, type theory instead of set theory, or to handle the surreal numbers rather than merely the reals, or likewise to restrict only to the computational reals. Any one of these exercises might lead to newfound theoretical understanding. But that’s far from obvious at the onset, and my inclination is that these would be enormously complex undertakings that would only muddle the physics rather than clarifying anything[1]. Regardless, if you were halfway through this project and managed to pull something like the Einstein field equations out of your mess of math, it hardly proves anything. You started with a very general model that can express a great deal of general mathematics, and all you did was pull some specific mathematics out of it. It’s particularly egregious with Wolfram because nobody is impressed that cellular automata can express a great deal of mathematics which looks like physics. [1] Perhaps some approach will make certain computations easier (e.g the type theory approach and certain problems with group representations) but that’s different from new theoretical understanding. The point is that none of these approaches seem likely to give a testable prediction they differs from the “standard” formulation.
- ajarmst 6y agoI'm a fan---I even own a copy of the gorgeous hardcover edition of A New Kind of Science. However, this should be understood in context: Wolfram has been claiming that this approach would generate revolutionary changes (a paradigm shift, to use Kuhn's now hackneyed phrase) to how we understand and approach the universe for at least three and a half decades. He's brilliant, and has made some very important contributions to complexity theory, chaos, theoretical comp sci, discrete mathematics, etc. He also has a Bobby Fischer-level awareness and focus on his own superiority, and whatever the exact opposite of debilitating impostor syndrome would be. Still, that's true of many people that I admire but would probably not enjoy having dinner with (Nicholas Taleb, I'm looking at you.) Probably best to take some of his claims with a grain of salt until he proves them (which is not entirely unlikely in Wolfram's case).
- okintheory 6y agoI'm not aware of any important contributions made by Stephen Wolfram to theoretical computer science. What are some examples?
- chriswarbo 6y agoThe most obvious would be small universal systems, although (a) the importance of that is subjective and (b) much of the credit goes to others (e.g. Matthew Cook for proving Rule 110, Alex Smith for the 2,3 Turing Machine)
- jessriedel 6y agoBut the critique I've heard is that, in fact, folks like Cook and Smith deserve the credit and Wolfram played more like a coordinating role.
- taliesinb 6y agoThe attention ecosystems of entertainment, science, computing seem to favor a model people who are good at self-promoting a particular "brand" of work that really represents the labor of a much larger group of people. This simplification is useful for a couple of reasons: it nurtures the ego of the brand-manager, which almost has to be outsize to play this role. It is a simple enough story for the public to understand, and efficiently creates a large "catchment area" for people to become interested in the brand. And the brand managers can sometimes be good coordinators.
- networkimprov 6y agoStephen is really fun to listen to. This is from the Event Horizon podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpK1d8mTEhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpK1d8mTEhI
- mensetmanusman 6y agoI love that there are people trying out new conceptual models of physics that rely on vast computational resources (like hyper graphs). Does anyone know how this framework handles ‘spooky action at a distance’ ?
- geijoenr 6y agoI think is good people try new approaches to physics. Who this person is doesn't matter to me. But the top down approach I don't think has ever worked. Revolutions usually start when a small experimental problem is solved in a novel way. And from that a new model is built. I don't see that here, only delusions.
- Koshkin 6y ago> found a path to a truly fundamental theory of physics, and it was beautiful [1] "A new kind of physics?" Not again, please no. [1] 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...
- nautilus12 6y agoIs there anything out there trying to tie this or compare to Weinstein's theories? They seem to be of a similar geometric "unifying" theory flavor, and both universally rejected by the larger physics community for unclear reasons.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago>Is there anything out there trying to tie this or compare to Weinstein's theories? Yeah, there is: both are kooks.
- nautilus12 6y agoThis seems dismissive and generally unhelpful
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoOk, then here’s a more detailed take: both are rich people, using their money/influence to promote their fringe theories without making any experimentally veryfiable claim. There are tons of kooks like them. The only difference is that these two have a wider audience and more money to promote their “theories”.
- nautilus12 6y agoOk, this is much better. Thank you. So...Steven Hawking?
- smaddox 6y agoSo much negativity and character assassination in the comments here. Would be great if people could focus on the content of the article. The work Wolfram, Gorard, et. al have been doing on this is incredibly fascinating and mind bending. And I love that they are live streaming and posting videos of their working sessions so that non-academics can see how this kind of research is done. Regardless of whether this approach leads to new experimental predictions, it's important in that it's a fundentally computational model of physics that reproduces general relativity and quantumechanics. The concepts of multiway graphs and causal invariance are also valuable as ways to model and study nondeterministic computations; they turn such computations into objects with an underlying structure. And there are absolutely consequences for computer science and mathematics, in general, in studying such models.
- d_silin 6y agoI had actually read the article and here is my take: 1)Almost any mathematical abstraction can be used to match existing understanding of physics. Graphs, or groups or cellular automata. It is not wrong to try different kinds of those abstractions and there is nothing wrong with Wolfram's ideas in this department. 2) What matters is if you can deliver new insights from your model - be it general relativity, quantum mechanics or hypergraphs. Here his theory is extremely weak. Only two numerical values have been offered and they are experimentally non-testable as they are 50 orders of magnitude smaller than even corresponding Plank units (!) There are plenty of fringe theories with better predictive ability.
- smaddox 6y agoAs far as I am aware, this is the first and only discrete and computable model of physics capable of reproducing even one of general relativity or quantum mechanics, let alone both in a fully unified way. Are there others that I am not aware of? Edit: and in case it needs to be said, we now have had about 30 years of research into string theory and related theories without a single testable prediction. I agree that testability is critical, but every theory of physics beyond the standard model is lacking there.
- HarHarVeryFunny 6y agoIf Wolfram is as smart as he thinks he is, and/or his work as promising as he thinks it is, then wouldn't you expect some recognition of this from other theoretical physicists? Yet, there seems to be none. He seems to have generated his own empirical playground whose output he can squint at, rather like a haruspex, and see parallels to ... pretty much anything he wants to see.
- wasteofelectron 6y agoI love it, and I’m no Wolfram cheerleader. It’s proper 6am acid epiphany. In one essay he’s opened up my mind considerably, and even if he’s wrong, I’m so glad there are people who have this kind of ambition.