23 ms·

We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

255 points by nsoonhui 5y ago

gadders 5y ago
Can someone ELI5 this for me please?
leeoniya 5y ago
every time i read his writing, i think of this scene from Zoolander: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0brvXcCPbzM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0brvXcCPbzM
k8sToGo 5y ago
I used Wolfram Alpha a lot while I was in college and liked it a lot. So I am surprised to see the hatred toward this man in the comments. Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it?
- mitko 5y ago
  Probably he comes off as big ego, which we are hardwired to resist. However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence justified by his successes and track record, he’s created a lot of value for the world.
  - afc 5y ago
    > However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence [...] Funny, I see it as the entire opposite: very extreme insecurity, the need to constantly remind us that, yes, truly, he was there, he pioneered this, it _is_ amazing and awesome and will revolutionize everything, believe me, and it's only second to this other thing, which we must remind you, I invented. A confident person would strip away the fluff and just get on with the message?
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence Narcissism more often comes from hidden or repressed insecurity - the opposite of confidence.
    - mitko 5y ago
      Why not a mixture of both? We all have insecurities- I’m sure even Mr Wolfram. But success also leads to confidence. An entrepreneur has to pitch his brand and “wolfram” is his strongest brand. Would love if someone massively successful explains what that feels like
- pasquinelli 5y ago
  i can't, but i don't care about him. apparently he's pissed some people off. naturally, when his name comes up, it gets noticed by those people. especially when he's starting his own institute... named after himself.
- hobofan 5y ago
  > Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it? DISCLAIMER: Views not necessarily my own I think it would be hard to try to pinpoint a single point in time where "he lost it". Stephen Wolfram grew up as a mathematician/physicist wunderkind, so as it's often the case for people that produced highly praised work early in their life, it's hard to transition to a life with humbleness and where output is received with anything else than praise. In the past he has made a number of outlandish claims that didn't bear fruit (predictably so), to an extent that one would think that only a delusional person could make them. E.g. he did a lot of work on cellular automata, and wrote a book titled "A new kind of science", in which he predicted that cellular automata would revolutionize all kinds of natural sciences (hint: that didn't happen). He later made similar claims for Wolfram Alpha revolutionizing search engines, and the Wolfram language revolutionizing programming.
  - ogogmad 5y ago
    Wolfram Alpha isn't "revolutionary" perhaps, but it's surprisingly useful for some queries. There's the obvious use-case of solving mathematical problems. But you can also use it to (for instance) count the number of weeks from 3rd August 2022 to 7th January 2023. It often "just works" for these kinds of things.
    - copperx 5y ago
      It's funny; 99% of my interactions with Wolfram Alpha are about dates.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
  There are two Stephen Wolframs: the one who makes useful software (Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha), and the one who fancies himself an academic. His success in the former lets him avoid humility in the latter, and this conflict is where the problems come in.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Wolfram is by any measure a successful academic. One general issue though is that particle physics basically hit a dead end. The future was in simulation (hence Mathematica) and then the idea that the universe is computational and if it is how could it be and how might it work. This multi computational idea seems to draw from the double slit experiment where observation collapses the wave function and the multi-probability path history based on the observer. This is saying that computations can be modeled similarly. And this type of model handles non-determinism in general and "threads of time" apparently. Interesting. Ambitious but very interesting.
tom-thistime 5y ago
"Why shouldn't Dr. X claim that he has originated a completely new theory of physics?" Because nobody has seen any prediction of any physical phenomenon based on this work. "Why are you so filled with hatred toward Dr. X?" Wait, what? I thought you wanted to talk about physics.
WheelsAtLarge 5y ago
It's kind of sad for me. I read and read but could not get the gist of the institute. Can someone write a summary?
- perihelions 5y ago
  If you scroll down a bit, I think the 26th paragraph comes closest to lucidity: - "What will the Wolfram Institute be like? There’ll be a leadership core, which, yes, I’m signing up to head. But the main meat of the institute will be a collection of researchers and fellows, working on particular, managed projects—together with students at multiple levels from high school to graduate school. We’ll be doing open science, so there’ll be lots of livestreaming and lots of open tools produced. There’ll be lots of working materials and academic papers published, and whenever we manage to make a big step forward our plan is to present it to the world using the immediate and accessible approach to exposition that I’ve developed."
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    That sounds amazing! I wish they'd study something like energy storage or cheap imaging mmWave radar, or portable chemical analyzers, or any of those supposedly world changing things that seem to totally vanish without a trace again whenever anyone makes a breakthrough. Hopefully it's not just this?new physics thing.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      I think he was pretty clear that the Wolfram Institute, headed by Stephen Wolfram, has the single purpose of exploring the Wolfram Multicomputation model as a new foundation for all of science and mathematics. To do so, it is going to apply Wolfram's methods for productivity that have made Wolfram Research a successful company, and Wolfram Physics Project a successful delivery. Also of note, any major discoveries will be shared to the world in Wolframs clear and simple exposition style. In short, maybe this leads somewhere, who knows, but right now it looks like a massive vanity project. It also looks like it has a good chance to start derailing other people's money from actual research into Wolfram Pet Theories.
seibelj 5y ago
This guy is full-on crank at this point. His newer kind of science is going to revolutionize everything, I’m sure. > We want to use our new paradigm to basically rewrite the foundations of several important fields of science. As with the Physics Project there’ll no doubt be tremendous synergy with existing approaches and the communities around them. Cellular automatons are going to do all of this?
- Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
  Let's not mention the questionable ego driven naming scheme for the place.
- ttul 5y ago
  I saw Wolfram give a live talk after launching his big ass book on cellular automata being the foundation of all things. It seemed far fetched and I don’t think anyone outside of his egosphere takes the concept seriously. Let alone understands it.
  - john567 5y ago
    What he is trying to do is that he is trying to create a computational theory to explain the world. As opposed to pure mathematics which isn't computational. Not really that crazy. He may be off putting at times but when he gets in to it he can be very interesting to listen to.
    - adastra22 5y ago
      Pure math isn’t computational? o_O (Constructivist mathematics is a thing, and it is pretty easy to formulate physics in a constructivist framework. Many serious quantum theoreticians do.)
      - laichzeit0 5y ago
        My current layman pseudo-insight into this: Why in mathematics do we want to approximate non-linear functions by linear functions? Why do we not have sufficient theory to understand complex non-linear phenomena? Perhaps a different paradigm is required.
vasco 5y ago
I'm not knowledgeable enough to have an opinion on the physics project, but I find it interesting how polarized HN is about it. For some people it's a whole new world that will lead to new findings, for others it seems like they compare it to them having invented a new language and acting busy "translating" everything that was already discovered to this new language and being surprised they can. Funny how even mathematics and physics can be so subjective when most people can't actually work through the math themselves and only depend on "expert" opinion.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  I think it's hard to take anyone seriously when claiming that they have a new model that will revolutionize the foundations of particle physics, molecular biology, metamathematics, economics, evolutionary biology, complexity theory, and others. Of course it's possible, but the magnitude of the claims about vastly disparate fields feels more like someone who only has a bird's-eye view and sees shallow similarities. Importantly though, neither I nor anyone commenting on Wolfram's plans and thoughts are engaging in mathematics or physics. If anything, the arguments around are mostly to do with the philosophy or sociology of science - looking at how discoveries have usually worked throughout history and comparing that to Wolframs work. To go into the math, you must have some belief that it is worthwhile to spend your time to do quite difficult work, and most arguments around here are about why his work currently doesn't seem to pass that mark. EDIT: to put a number on how difficult engaging with the actual maths and physics would be, according to the article, the Wolfram Research Project has currently published 700 pages worth of discoveries. To be honest about my own feelings, when I see him claiming his new model will explain what mathematics is - it makes me think he's only a few years away from claiming it explains the meaning of life and why there is something instead of nothing. Perhaps even squaring the circle and computing the number of angels that fit on the head of a pin...
- aj7 5y ago
  You will find, I think, the gradient you allude to, to be inversely proportional to the level of physics that the reviewer has attained. Now this could have “political” implications: people with a lot invested in conventional physics might be hostile as a means of protecting that investment. But I think not.
ridaj 5y ago
The more I hear about Stephen Wolfram's schemes to name things after Stephen Wolfram, the more admirative I grow of Nicolas Bourbaki and wished he were publishing amazing math software these days.
- froh 5y ago
  You've sent me down an interesting reading path, about a group of mathematicians working under the pseudonym "Nicolas Bourbaki" and lo and behold they do even have a web site these days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki https://www.bourbaki.fr/ https://www.bourbaki.fr/ Now how does that relate to Stephen Wolfram?
  - Cyph0n 5y ago
    A group of mathematicians operating under a pseudonym is basically the exact opposite of a single mathematician naming everything after himself.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      Only until the pseudonym becomes famous and it's basically the same thing.
      - morelisp 5y ago
        The difference is capitalism. The name has some prestige, but it would be difficult for "Nicolas Bourbaki" to leverage "his" mathematical fame to accumulate wealth in a way that allows "him" to advocate a particularly fringe theory of, say, virology. Wolfram, on the other hand, can leverage Mathematica to get rich, and use his riches to continue to push NKS, despite zero (or less) interest from physicists.
        emteycz 5y ago
        Nobody has to listen to Wolfram. Close his graphomaniac blog and forget about him. On the other hand, academic credit (not merit) will get you much further than money in many cases - and the lack of it (while not lacking merit) is a serious impediment on the progress of many scientific projects. The difference? Socialism. Wolfram uses his own taxed income to further his goals, while meritless scientists use the broken system of academia and the income from taxes (that should've been used to further real science) to accomplish theirs.
NumberCruncher 5y ago
Either he is onto something or not, but his ego is going to scare any sane person away.
- sjg007 5y ago
  You have to be a little crazy to work on something this ambitious for any length of time because it is not mainstream and probably hard to get grants for in the traditional sense. DNNs faced and still face enormous criticism from statisticians, mathematicians and it was only after proof of their utility that academics could no longer ignore them.
syats 5y ago
Let us concede that in the last 20 years, the number of mentions of "I" in his writing has decreased, and there are more mentions of "We". As much as a cellular automata, and computation in general, fan as I am, and after having read a fair amount of his work... I am still not convinced that Wolfram is not just a rich crack pot.
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
  Is he a genius or a crackpot? Yes.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  To me that reads mostly like the royal "we", as in "We, Stephen Wolfram". Especially when saying things like "Wolfram Research has been geared towards making things we think up into products".
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Let him do his thing, he supports many employees for a living, and does meaningful work occassionally. There are many people that are far more problematic for the society than Mr. Wolfram. He hasn't done any harm to anyone. Let him chill in peace.
  - ginnungagap 5y ago
    > He hasn't done any harm to anyone. Reading posts from former employees and plagiarism accusations (look up Matthew Cook) suggests otherwise. I remember this being discussed on HN before as well, even though the search function is not bringing up anything.
    - mklarmann 5y ago
      I worked with Matthew Cook at ETH Zürich after he left wolfram for that reason. Cooks proof of the Turing completeness of the 110 rule [1] is in my opinion the only interesting piece in the new kind of science book. The dispute emerged from wolfram handling this not with science in mind, but capitalism. Putting an NDA on the publication of cook, to frame himself as the source. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110
henrydark 5y ago
Is it though?
tzlanders 5y ago
tmsh 5y ago
Out of the thousand amazing breakthroughs in the history of science or mathematics I can think of zero that said they were in the text itself. Show not tell.
- robotresearcher 5y ago
  “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” Watson and Crick’s one sentence paragraph towards the end of their 1.5-page paper on the structure of DNA, that explained the mechanism of heredity and thus evolution in living things, and won them a Nobel Prize. These guys didn’t take the opportunity to share the glory with Franklin that they should have, but they sure did render a wonderfully genteel understatement of the import of their work.
- evilotto 5y ago
  "The above proposition is occasionally useful." From Principia Mathematica, several hundred pages in, after proving that 1+1=2
d--b 5y ago
This is sad for whoever is signing up to work on this. The man is delusional. The claims of revolutionizing everything from physics to economics are a clear evidence that the man lost it. He’s just a guru now.
- hosteur 5y ago
  > The man is delusional. Why?
  - poulpy123 5y ago
    Because he pretends to have a theory revolutioning all kinds of sciences, while not revolutioning even one. That's typical of crackpots
aj7 5y ago
I’ve had more downvotes sharing my opinions about cellular automata on HN than on any other topic, so I won’t make any here. Rather, I’d like to point out that I personally have not seen a single theory, not a single piece of a theory, known to be productive in explaining experimental data, recast with underlying cellular automata theory. If I am simply showing my ignorance, please enlighten me. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  I think it's a good thing to have a small percentage of scientists working on whacky theories, one of them might turn out to be true.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    Plus it's not like Wolfram is taking resources away from other scientists as he is funded from his company. If Wolfram wasn't doing this he'd be CEO'ing his company, there's no cost to the public for Wolfram exploring this and potentially huge gains - though unlikely.
    - a_bonobo 5y ago
      There could be an opportunity costs, researchers working on this could be working on a different problem. Unlikely, but not impossible.
      - taylorius 5y ago
        I'm fairly sure Wolfram's researchers are working on it because they are interested, and want to do it.
    - abdullahkhalids 5y ago
      Money is not the only resource. Scientist time is another resource, and probably a lot more important when it comes to Physics. Any private venture such as this necessarily (a) takes up scientist time, (b) provides training to scientists that can be applied to other problems later on, (c) as a second order effect, molds the public's perception of science in a certain way. (a), (b) or (c) could individually be positive or negative to society. And their net could be positive or negative. I don't know what these values are for Wolfram's work, but we can definitely make this sort of nuanced analysis.
poulpy123 5y ago
I know that he has a lot of credentials (and more and better than mine) but it's still read like some crackpot science blog article
mycroftiv 5y ago
Good luck with this venture, I think a lot of minds have contributed to progress in these fields and sharing both the labors and the fruits is important.
bmc7505 5y ago
It must feel terribly vindicating to be shunned by IAS for pursuing unpopular research, ridiculed by your intellectual heroes for lacking social graces, branded a charlatan your entire professional career by the academic establishment despite running a profitable company for over three decades, then funding a rival institute to pursue the original research you had set out to do 40 years ago.
- pretendscholar 5y ago
  >branded a charlatan your entire professional career by the academic establishment despite running a profitable company for over three decades Those two features are not mutually exclusive.
  - bmc7505 5y ago
    They are if your customers are mostly academic researchers.
Pilottwave 5y ago
Lots of comments about his "arrogance" but i just see someone passionate, judge for yourself! He has three long interviews on Lex Fridmans youtube channel! I greatly enjoyed watching those those. 1:[Stephen Wolfram: Cellular Automata, Computation, and Physics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA) 2:[Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t1_ffaFXao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t1_ffaFXao) 3: [Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality ](https://youtu.be/4-SGpEInX_c https://youtu.be/4-SGpEInX_c)
- poulpy123 5y ago
  You can be passionate and arrogant.
  - WithinReason 5y ago
    He didn't seem arrogant to me from the Lex podcasts. He seems to have no problem admitting when he doesn't know something or when he was wrong. Maybe his overuse of the "I" pronoun gives the wrong impression?
    - poulpy123 5y ago
      More the overuse of his name to name other things and the fact he has been talking about revolutioning science for at least 2 facades without doing it.
      - poulpy123 5y ago
        *decades
        cwilkes 5y ago
        I think façade fits better in this case
      - xhkkffbf 5y ago
karcass 5y ago
"Still not sure which will become self-aware first: Wolfram Alpha, or Stephen Wolfram"
jillesvangurp 5y ago
I have the man's magnum opus on my shelf. Cheeky graduation present from a friend. Never managed to enjoy reading it unfortunately but it makes for a great paper weight. I also occasionally use it as a laptop stand. It's big and heavy and oddly convenient for that. This press release is a bit long, incoherent, and manages an impressive number of buzzwords that I don't normally associate with cellular automata. Can somebody maybe translate this to English, filter out the narcissist self glorification and actually explain what it is this institute is planning to actually do? I bet it's something like cellular automata all the way down.
- jongorer 5y ago
  “Witness me”
- comboy 5y ago
  I recommend his Lex Friedman interviews on youtube. I've been reading and listening to Wolfram for some time and Lex manages to somehow get the most out of him. The ego is annoying and personally I don't think that New Kind of Science is very high in information density (may be my ignorance), but Wolfram definitely has many many great insights to offer if you are able to just ignore the remarks about him being the first in the world that did that 30 years ago in computer science, physics and biology. He did and keeps doing amazing things that are indeed much ahead of the competition. This is not a new pattern, I've posted this link before HN but I want to repeat it so many times [1] - we are standing on shoulders of jerks (I do not think Wolfram is a jerk btw, but people clearly have some problem with his way of being) 1. https://youtu.be/bsgWSPWX-6A?t=650 https://youtu.be/bsgWSPWX-6A?t=650
  - disqard 5y ago
    I hadn't heard of the Intellectual Dark Web until just now. Thank you!
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
jwildeboer 5y ago
The text really has some cult leadership vibes to it IMHO.
DantesKite 5y ago
Man these are some low-quality comments. You’d think Wolfram was torturing gerbils or something. I don’t mind criticisms of my favorite thinkers. I enjoy watching someone being taken to task in the battle of ideas so to speak, but apparently something about Wolfram just rubs people the wrong way, because they seem to lose the ability to make cogent arguments after reading him. As a simple example of what a healthy discussion could look like: Wolfram didn’t believe black holes were real for the longest time, or at least, had some skepticism about that. One could’ve had a reasonable debate, pointing out where he may have erred (up until he changed his mind). Like a proper scientist does. But vilifying him for wanting to create a research institute is absurd. I have never seen such petty anger at the idea of doing more scientific research. He’s done a fantastic job creating a new model for understanding reality, some of which suggest interesting physical structures underlying our Universe. He’s changed my understanding of evolution completely with his insights on computational irreducibility and complexity. And he’s laying the groundwork for understanding the meta-rules that undergird not just our Universe, but all possible Universes. It’s fantastic stuff. The great Richard Feynman himself frequently collaborated with Wolfram and talked about Rule 30, the foundational insight that spurred Wolfram to create a New Kind of Science. Calling him delusional or a fraud is Wittengtein’s Ruler in action: It says far more about you than it does about him. I always click on a Wolfram thread, and occasionally you do get interesting insights and even informed disagreements, but this is just disgraceful to be honest. There’s true evil in the world. Truly despicable sins. Calibrate your outrage towards that. If you disagree with Wolfram, read his work, steelman it, and show where it’s wrong in a way worthy of scientific skepticism and empiricism. Otherwise you’re worse than what you think he is.
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  > show where it’s wrong Do you know the expression "not even wrong"?
  - m12k 5y ago
    They're trying to come up with a new way of modelling the foundations of physics. In order to be "even wrong", they need to make falsifiable predictions. As far as I can tell, they're not at (or claiming to be at) that level of maturity of the model, they seem to be slowly working toward feature parity with existing models. Whether they ever achieve that remains to be seen. Whether they manage to coalesce all this into a single coherent theory remains to be seen. Whether they manage to make novel, falsifiable predictions or not remains to be seen. And if they do, whether these predictions will be falsified or not also remains to be seen. Long story short, I don't see why being "not even wrong" at this phase is some great sin.
dinobones 5y ago
Cmd+F: "free speech" Oh thank god, it's not one of "those" institutes.
noizejoy 5y ago
Could be a fun ask HN: What would happen if Mr. Wolfram and Mr. Musk would have to share the same room for a while?
- emteycz 5y ago
  Tesla Model W would lift-off from that building after a short while. But seriously - I think they'd find a common language. Both are set in their ways and these ways are far from each other, but I don't think they'd fight, verbally or not.
- isitmadeofglass 5y ago
  Good question. Wolfram shared some time with Steve Jobs once and Mathematica happened. /jk of cause, but it actually was Jobs who came up with the idea for the name.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    I know Mathematica was first on the NeXT, but never considered their meeting; anywhere I can read more about that?
    - isitmadeofglass 5y ago
      I believe that it’s mentioned in some of Wolframs blog posts, but my search failed me. But it’s covered by the guardian here https://amp.theguardian.com/theobserver/2011/dec/11/steve-jobs-obituary-stephen-wolfram https://amp.theguardian.com/theobserver/2011/dec/11/steve-jo...
- gary_0 5y ago
  One man emerges, twice as large.
- farseer 5y ago
  Things would get physical very quickly, probably ending with Musk strangling Wolfram due to his advanced age.
estevaoam 5y ago
I think Law of Jante summarizes the 'zeitgeist' of HN comments towards this man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante The goal should be always to understand and discuss ideas, despite egos. As hard that can be practically, anything else is unproductive and not worth persuing. His thoughts and theories are something to not ignore, but to follow with the same skepticism as any revolutionary claim should be. That should be irrespective of the author. But we need to give value to new ideas and have a small dose of optimism, that way we can be open to true innovation and paradigm shifts. But there is nothing bad that Wolfram's mind is powerful. I doubt anyone here would dare to try to create something as complicated as it's Wolfram service.
- pretendscholar 5y ago
  >Law of Jante summarizes the 'zeitgeist' Why do you feel the need to dress up your comment to be something more than "you guys are just jealous."? Most of the comments criticizing Wolfram in this comment section discuss A New Kind of Science, cellular automata and hypergraphs but yours has no reference to any of the ideas discussed. Your post fluffs Wolfram to an absurd degree without ever actually providing any specific idea that is revolutionary or great. >I doubt anyone here would dare to try to create something as complicated as it's Wolfram service. Complicated is not a virtue.
  - estevaoam 5y ago
    With all due respect fellow HN reader, I never said his idea was great or revolutionary. When I posted my comment, most comments I read then haven't tried to discuss any specific points nor his ideas, and my comment was for those. Most were discrediting the guy just based on his personality. No matter how big this man's ego are, and I also think it is, he has proven himself a creator so far and to be passionate on those topics. For me, that's enough to not dismiss him as crazy or charlatan, especially so early. My main point here is not aimed to defend or "fluff" Wolfram – I don't care about him personally. It is only about how our society does not have a healthy culture on receiving new ideas. Let him and his team pursue his research – if this turns up to be something remarkable, time will show us – and humanity will benefit from it. I posted "Law of Jante" as I see this happening over and over again. Different contexts, same "boohoo, this person think they're better than us". >Complicated is not a virtue. That is not correct. Complicated just means a complex 'something'. If the complexity of 'something' is accidental or not, that is another topic and is not even subject to moral judgment IMO. Now, to develop complex software in a complex domain over several years, this is something hard and only someone sane can do that. So I'm just optimistic and open to see what his team will output from all this. Have a great weekend!
isitmadeofglass 5y ago
Sounds interesting And I’m looking forwards to seeing what this brings along.
dudeinjapan 5y ago
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they... I forget the rest but sometimes they just keep laughing at you for a long time.
shetill 5y ago
can someone TL;DR this?
schappim 5y ago
In spite of all the negativity, I admire Stephen because he has done what many of us want to achieve, namely: Billion dollar SW company that is privately owned, that now enables him to pursue his intellectual interests.
genis 5y ago
iiu
- genis 5y ago
  test
OOvsuOO 5y ago
Wolfram software is awesome! It beats any other software and it's why they charge for it. It's worth it. Education about computers, science and math made easier to manipulate. Fact based results. If you google something you get jumbled results. Wolfram either you get it right with some facts back at your query. Or you get nil. You can be confident that it's a fact staring at you. You can cross reference and check it too! that's something google can't do. Expand your world, try out Wolfram. Wolfram behooves truth it seems people are afraid of the truth. Hence the comments here. Being able to do your own research and learn programming. I haven't seen a better documentation for software compared to Wolfram's. He's beyond time in the future. Wolfram's software was used on the ISS to do some real world calculations to make a course correction. It helped me understand programming and computers. I look forward to wolfram adventures. Computer literacy can be understood and learned using Wolfram.
- saberience 5y ago
  This reads like a comment generated by Wolfram's version of GPT3 trained only on his own writing.
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    Ram is Wolf. Wolf is Life. Life is Wolf Ram. - Michael GPT-3 Scott
    - OOvsuOO 5y ago
      Only a real human would understand the tone. And I received it.
infogulch 5y ago
The one thing that unites mathematicians throughout history and field is the pursuit of beauty. And by some happenstance the most beautiful theories are often found to be useful in the real world. Human beings are embedded and embodied in this admittedly beautiful fractally complex existence. Somehow it doesn't seem surprising for us to be attracted to patterns that can manifest in our reality. If anything, finite automata are beautiful.
tokai 5y ago
It's interesting with the sycophant outrage over criticism of Wolfram. With arguments ala "criticise his work not his person". But if you actually follow his work (scientific work, not his business) it is clear that there is a lot to critique, but not in a useful sense. Scholarly reviews of A New Kind of Science were universally negative. The usefulness of what he proposes is doubtful and it is unoriginal. He is unable to engage with other scientists in a way that furthers his program. And he is know to use academic shadow writers. I can't wrap my head a around why anyone would defend a self-centred entrepreneur that purchase the scientific relevance he couldn't work up organically (Sending thousands of copies of your own book to academic libraries all over the world is very much not in the spirit of science).
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
  With HN's obsession with “founders” of startups, it's perhaps not surprising that Wolfram gets so much sympathy here. It's hero worship. I think Wolfram is a victim of his own success. His achievements in software have let him avoid the necessary humility in being an academic.
  - m12k 5y ago
    > that Wolfram gets so much sympathy here. Are we reading the same comments? My impression is that 80%-90% are negative toward him.
    - tokai 5y ago
      The three top comments here are positive.
- sjg007 5y ago
  Neural networks were basically negatively critiqued for decades. I think there is something to cellular automata and there's definitely a relationship between CAs and DNNs that is unexplored.
  - 5y ago
peterweyand0 5y ago
The idea that cellular automaton can form a foundation for physics that mathematics can't seems incredibly unlikely. Mathematica is a useful program, but his claims are a bit over the top compared to the critiques from fellow scientists.
- sjg007 5y ago
  Well all CAs are math so I am not sure what you mean here. CAs are basically state space in time models that may exhibit some general predictable behaviors that can be described by math.
- daneelsan 5y ago
  I'm not sure why comments mention CA. His physics theory and the multicomputation stuff does not make use of CA's (at least no more than any other abstract machine).
ThePhysicist 5y ago
Stephen Wolfram basically lives my dream as an "entrepreneurial scientist". He is successful in academia and business and has his own money to fund his own research ideas. I am nowhere near as prolific as he is but I have to admire him for how he managed to pursue his dreams.
mrjangles 5y ago
I don't understand all these comments saying "Sure Wolfram may be arrogant, but he has achieved amazing things". "lets look at his work and ideas not him as a person". ... What does this even mean? Steven Wolfram has never achieved a single thing in science or mathematics. Absolutely no one has ever said otherwise, except for Steven Wolfram himself. I used to think he was a failed scientist who, at least, was good with computers and software, but after seeing the decline in the quality of Mathematica, and the hairbrain schemes he has been leading there instead of improving his core software, it has become clear to me that he wasn't even the one responsible for Mathematica being so great, and whoever it was has now left the company.
- daneelsan 5y ago
  Didn't he invent a numbering schema for classifying CA? That should count as an achievement.
  - mrjangles 5y ago
    The fact that no one could possibly have a clue what this sentence means is a pretty good indication of how important this work was.
    - daneelsan 5y ago
      OK bud
- posix_me_less 5y ago
  Feynman wrote something in the sense Wolfram did invent an interesting way to implement quantum chromodynamics on a computer, so he did something contributory to science.
  - mrjangles 5y ago
    You are going to need a very specific citation for that because, if he did, no one working in physics today has heard of it.
simne 5y ago
I have question: how I could use data from Wolfram pages with opensource software, best with Python libraries?
westurner 5y ago
What an excellent article title. [edit] Perchance, why? Why is the Wolfram Institute Necessary?
kalimanzaro 5y ago
https://youtu.be/F3hPvusB0ds https://youtu.be/F3hPvusB0ds For those who are turned off by "cerebritiesh" (pronounced the way Taleb fan of Wolfie would, or perhaps Sean Connery if he had the chance to meet the old dog in person) But who secretly indulge in Nobel laureate fanboyism Here is a video of 't Hooft talking about cell autos & quanta. I don't understand it but boy am I happy to see properly labelled figures for self-styled adults. Dutch prof has the homely charm of mashed potatoes which goes well with dreams of Illinois corn fields (near the Wolfie homebase) should you fall asleep
bigbillheck 5y ago
Say what you like about Wolfram, and I know I certainly have, but in his defense he appears to have not been personally connected to Jeffery Epstein.
ergonaught 5y ago
I’m not hating on the man, as I do not care enough about him or his alleged behaviors or alleged personality traits to hate any of it, but let’s all be honest here and recognize that we’ve reached the “Is it GPT-3 or is it Stephen Wolfram?” singularity. He produces enormous, voluminous, prodigious quantities of words, usually built around a very interesting core prompt, that seem to imply that they may point to something that will definitely be significant, using words that certainly carry a suggested context of the scent of sciencemath, and this goes on forever, but goes nowhere. You can definitely be smarter and see farther and clearer than your critics and your peers, but at the “end of the day” you have to deliver something actionable, a result, a real change. Where has this occurred?
- codethief 5y ago
  > let’s all be honest here and recognize that we’ve reached the “Is it GPT-3 or is it Stephen Wolfram?” singularity. Damn, that's such a great way of putting it!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Invictus0 5y ago
How can anyone read this and admire this man? 'A new paradigm' this, I I I that.
Traster 5y ago
I've read through this very carefully and it's very difficult for me to understand what exactly he thinks is a breakthrough. Generally when we're talking about breakthroughs in physics in theoretical physics we're often talking about a new idea that links previous ideas, or an emergent property from a theory that we can then test. I've read a bit about it, and it seems to boil down to "Model things as a graph and simple set of rules about how that graph changes over time steps", and doing this if you plug in the right stuff you get something you recognise from somewhere else in physics. Which seems both unsurprising, and not a break through? It's like an ML problem, you don't get credit for predicting things that have already happened. Does anyone know where this approach is pushing forward the totality of physics?
- jfengel 5y ago
  He seems to believe that trying to base science in terms of cellular automata will turn up something new and interesting. It hasn't yet, but he sees hints that similar patterns crop up at a wide variety of scales when you frame it the way he does. Few scientists seem to agree with him on that, and it hasn't produced any novel results. To borrow an old joke, "His book contains much that is new and much that is interesting. But that which is new is not interesting, and that which is interesting is not new." Nothing seems to have been forthcoming in the decades since it was published. On the other hand, he produced at least one very important thing in the past, and presumably has gobs of money. So he's welcome to pursue his idea. Most scientists don't think it will pan out, but it's his time and his money to waste. He's trying to recruit people, and I would caution that it's probably a waste of time -- as would people far more qualified than me. Still... it's also their time to spend/waste.
Tr3nton 5y ago
I've been hearing/seeing Stephen Wolfram's name for about 2 decades. Each time I see it, it's associated with some supposed incredible breakthrough in math, science, physics, or perhaps a combination of those; and that's it. There's never any application to the real world, there's never any great discovery that enlightens or improves the common man's life. You could argue I'm not smart enough to understand his work, but I could argue he's not smart enough to make the importance of his work comprehensible to dumb people like me.
- ChadNauseam 5y ago
  Well, the majority of academic work in physics is not at all enlightening to the "common man". And yet Wolfram's career has benefited and enlightened the common man 100x more than the average academic through Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica alone.
Barrera 5y ago
> Something remarkable has happened these past two years. For 45 years I’ve devoted myself to building a taller and taller tower of science and technology—which along the way has delivered many outputs of which I’m quite proud. But starting in 2020 with the unexpected breakthroughs of our Wolfram Physics Project we’ve jumped to a whole new level. And suddenly—yes, building on our multi-decade tower—it seems as if we’ve found a new paradigm that’s incredibly powerful, and that’s going to let us tackle an almost absurd range of longstanding questions in all sorts of areas of science. An author who sets a piece up like that had better deliver the goods - big time. The author does not. You might expect that "new paradigm" of his to have rocked the scientific world. It hasn't. The big idea is: "Multicomputation." And despite voluminous writing on the topic it's nothing more than noodling cellular automata in ways that have had no effect whatsoever on chemistry, physics, or biology.
- narrator 5y ago
  I'd say that gradient descent and deep learning have made obsolete whatever cellular automata stuff Wolfram has come up with. Neural nets can approximate any function. Cellular automata has a much more limited range that only includes the generation of some interesting pictures and not much else of interest, IMHO. To be charitable, if he had some way to mathematically slide between and combine networks of cellular automata, he might have something, but it would probably just end up reinventing deep learning and neural nets on a slightly different set of primitives.
  - Stupulous 5y ago
    Cellular automata can be Turing complete, so they cover at least the entire range of a neural net, and more if it's not recurrent.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  >An author who sets a piece up like that had better deliver the goods - big time. The author does not. That's been my impression of Stephen Wolfram and what he does in general. He has some accomplishments but his ego is comically large by comparison with those. Very hard to take him seriously.
gavinray 5y ago
Could anyone ELI5 the general ideas that Wolfram has been talking about the last few years? I read the (original) announcement post, and the visuals are very interesting and full of neat geometric structures but it's so far over my head I haven't a clue what he's talking about. It's some sort of theory about fundamental structures/relationships that underlie "everything"? How mathematically viable/potentially-legitimate is this? His work doesn't read like a nutjob to me but I also don't have the credibility to judge.
circlefavshape 5y ago
Did anyone else read this hoping for an invitation for nerds like us to Do Awesome Science and Change The World? Disappointed
baggiponte 5y ago
Definitely would achieve more if he open sourced mathematica
- daneelsan 5y ago
  Would it be profitable, though?
georgewfraser 5y ago
Wolfram wolfram wolfram wolfram! Wolfram’s wolfram wolfram, wolfram wolfram. Wolfram wolfram? Wolfram wolfram wolfram wolfram.
- lioeters 5y ago
  Looks like you've discovered the Wolfram Calculus, a universal model of computation in which all the laws of physics can be derived from the simple, irreducible existence of Wolfram, the Self of all selves.
fbanon 5y ago
Stephen Woflram have been pushing his cellular automata for 20 years now (A New Kind of Science came out in 2002). Can you point me to a single useful result that came out of it?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dannykwells 5y ago
I came across this today: https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/all/ https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/all/ "Note: Since 1987, Stephen Wolfram’s intellectual efforts have not primarily been reported in academic articles." To be clear - no serious scientist believes that a scholarly output which is composed predominantly of non-peer reviewed publications is a serious or valid output. Essentially, Wolfram is a glorified blogger who runs a tech company. That's not nothing, but it doesn't make someone a scientific leader.
- michael_j_ward 5y ago
  Ideas being subjected to peer review != the institutionalized "Peer Review Process(TM)"
  - dannykwells 5y ago
    Ideas being subjected to peer review \approx the institutionalized "Peer Review Process(TM)"
j7ake 5y ago
What’s with the hate? Let the man do his research. It’s not tax payer dollars. The number of tax-dollar paid academics who are doing research as “useless” as his (useless defined by the haters) vastly outnumber the ones at Wolfram.
- michael_j_ward 5y ago
  Alan Kay has part of the answer in this talk [0] where elucidates the errors taken by formal Comp Sci education. He claims there was a battle in the university between testable curriculum centered around Algorithms and builder curriculums based around hardware and distributed systems, and says it's a shame that algorithms won out. [0] Alan Kay : July 2007 : A Conversation with CMU Faculty & Students https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8
  - disqard 5y ago
    Thank you for sharing that link!
TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
I'm not smart enough to judge work of such momentous significance. Is this for real, or is this guy a wealthy quack? It just seems like I would have heard more about it if it was real. Or are we living through a Galileo moment where a genius is laboring outside the established institutions and is closer to the truth than the establishment? My neo-cortex is just not capable enough to judge these things, but I hope smarter people here can chime in.
DonBarredora 5y ago
This guy is so full of himself. He is going to explode anytime.
kkfx 5y ago
I like to a certain extent and admire Mathematica and Alpha (I dislike their closeness) BUT one thing I fear are "centered universities", by their own name they MUST be universal so public and open, not backed by anyone in particular. That's remain the same for anything alike. BTW for those who read French I suggest: Libérez votre cerveau! by Idriss Aberkane on teaching and developing knowledge.
RenTech 5y ago
https://dockets.justia.com/docket/alabama/alndce/5:2021cv00418/176632 https://dockets.justia.com/docket/alabama/alndce/5:2021cv004... He's just running out the back door because of this case...
narratorr 5y ago
narratorr 5y ago

255 points by nsoonhui 5y ago

Can someone ELI5 this for me please?

every time i read his writing, i think of this scene from Zoolander: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0brvXcCPbzM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0brvXcCPbzM

k8sToGo 5y ago

I used Wolfram Alpha a lot while I was in college and liked it a lot. So I am surprised to see the hatred toward this man in the comments. Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it?

mitko 5y ago
Probably he comes off as big ego, which we are hardwired to resist. However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence justified by his successes and track record, he’s created a lot of value for the world.
- afc 5y ago
  > However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence [...] Funny, I see it as the entire opposite: very extreme insecurity, the need to constantly remind us that, yes, truly, he was there, he pioneered this, it _is_ amazing and awesome and will revolutionize everything, believe me, and it's only second to this other thing, which we must remind you, I invented. A confident person would strip away the fluff and just get on with the message?
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence Narcissism more often comes from hidden or repressed insecurity - the opposite of confidence.
  - mitko 5y ago
    Why not a mixture of both? We all have insecurities- I’m sure even Mr Wolfram. But success also leads to confidence. An entrepreneur has to pitch his brand and “wolfram” is his strongest brand. Would love if someone massively successful explains what that feels like
pasquinelli 5y ago
i can't, but i don't care about him. apparently he's pissed some people off. naturally, when his name comes up, it gets noticed by those people. especially when he's starting his own institute... named after himself.
hobofan 5y ago
> Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it? DISCLAIMER: Views not necessarily my own I think it would be hard to try to pinpoint a single point in time where "he lost it". Stephen Wolfram grew up as a mathematician/physicist wunderkind, so as it's often the case for people that produced highly praised work early in their life, it's hard to transition to a life with humbleness and where output is received with anything else than praise. In the past he has made a number of outlandish claims that didn't bear fruit (predictably so), to an extent that one would think that only a delusional person could make them. E.g. he did a lot of work on cellular automata, and wrote a book titled "A new kind of science", in which he predicted that cellular automata would revolutionize all kinds of natural sciences (hint: that didn't happen). He later made similar claims for Wolfram Alpha revolutionizing search engines, and the Wolfram language revolutionizing programming.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  Wolfram Alpha isn't "revolutionary" perhaps, but it's surprisingly useful for some queries. There's the obvious use-case of solving mathematical problems. But you can also use it to (for instance) count the number of weeks from 3rd August 2022 to 7th January 2023. It often "just works" for these kinds of things.
  - copperx 5y ago
    It's funny; 99% of my interactions with Wolfram Alpha are about dates.
TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
There are two Stephen Wolframs: the one who makes useful software (Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha), and the one who fancies himself an academic. His success in the former lets him avoid humility in the latter, and this conflict is where the problems come in.
- sjg007 5y ago
  Wolfram is by any measure a successful academic. One general issue though is that particle physics basically hit a dead end. The future was in simulation (hence Mathematica) and then the idea that the universe is computational and if it is how could it be and how might it work. This multi computational idea seems to draw from the double slit experiment where observation collapses the wave function and the multi-probability path history based on the observer. This is saying that computations can be modeled similarly. And this type of model handles non-determinism in general and "threads of time" apparently. Interesting. Ambitious but very interesting.

tom-thistime 5y ago

"Why shouldn't Dr. X claim that he has originated a completely new theory of physics?" Because nobody has seen any prediction of any physical phenomenon based on this work. "Why are you so filled with hatred toward Dr. X?" Wait, what? I thought you wanted to talk about physics.

WheelsAtLarge 5y ago

It's kind of sad for me. I read and read but could not get the gist of the institute. Can someone write a summary?

perihelions 5y ago
If you scroll down a bit, I think the 26th paragraph comes closest to lucidity: - "What will the Wolfram Institute be like? There’ll be a leadership core, which, yes, I’m signing up to head. But the main meat of the institute will be a collection of researchers and fellows, working on particular, managed projects—together with students at multiple levels from high school to graduate school. We’ll be doing open science, so there’ll be lots of livestreaming and lots of open tools produced. There’ll be lots of working materials and academic papers published, and whenever we manage to make a big step forward our plan is to present it to the world using the immediate and accessible approach to exposition that I’ve developed."
- eternityforest 5y ago
  That sounds amazing! I wish they'd study something like energy storage or cheap imaging mmWave radar, or portable chemical analyzers, or any of those supposedly world changing things that seem to totally vanish without a trace again whenever anyone makes a breakthrough. Hopefully it's not just this?new physics thing.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    I think he was pretty clear that the Wolfram Institute, headed by Stephen Wolfram, has the single purpose of exploring the Wolfram Multicomputation model as a new foundation for all of science and mathematics. To do so, it is going to apply Wolfram's methods for productivity that have made Wolfram Research a successful company, and Wolfram Physics Project a successful delivery. Also of note, any major discoveries will be shared to the world in Wolframs clear and simple exposition style. In short, maybe this leads somewhere, who knows, but right now it looks like a massive vanity project. It also looks like it has a good chance to start derailing other people's money from actual research into Wolfram Pet Theories.

seibelj 5y ago

This guy is full-on crank at this point. His newer kind of science is going to revolutionize everything, I’m sure. > We want to use our new paradigm to basically rewrite the foundations of several important fields of science. As with the Physics Project there’ll no doubt be tremendous synergy with existing approaches and the communities around them. Cellular automatons are going to do all of this?

Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
Let's not mention the questionable ego driven naming scheme for the place.
ttul 5y ago
I saw Wolfram give a live talk after launching his big ass book on cellular automata being the foundation of all things. It seemed far fetched and I don’t think anyone outside of his egosphere takes the concept seriously. Let alone understands it.
- john567 5y ago
  What he is trying to do is that he is trying to create a computational theory to explain the world. As opposed to pure mathematics which isn't computational. Not really that crazy. He may be off putting at times but when he gets in to it he can be very interesting to listen to.
  - adastra22 5y ago
    Pure math isn’t computational? o_O (Constructivist mathematics is a thing, and it is pretty easy to formulate physics in a constructivist framework. Many serious quantum theoreticians do.)
    - laichzeit0 5y ago
      My current layman pseudo-insight into this: Why in mathematics do we want to approximate non-linear functions by linear functions? Why do we not have sufficient theory to understand complex non-linear phenomena? Perhaps a different paradigm is required.

vasco 5y ago

I'm not knowledgeable enough to have an opinion on the physics project, but I find it interesting how polarized HN is about it. For some people it's a whole new world that will lead to new findings, for others it seems like they compare it to them having invented a new language and acting busy "translating" everything that was already discovered to this new language and being surprised they can. Funny how even mathematics and physics can be so subjective when most people can't actually work through the math themselves and only depend on "expert" opinion.

tsimionescu 5y ago
I think it's hard to take anyone seriously when claiming that they have a new model that will revolutionize the foundations of particle physics, molecular biology, metamathematics, economics, evolutionary biology, complexity theory, and others. Of course it's possible, but the magnitude of the claims about vastly disparate fields feels more like someone who only has a bird's-eye view and sees shallow similarities. Importantly though, neither I nor anyone commenting on Wolfram's plans and thoughts are engaging in mathematics or physics. If anything, the arguments around are mostly to do with the philosophy or sociology of science - looking at how discoveries have usually worked throughout history and comparing that to Wolframs work. To go into the math, you must have some belief that it is worthwhile to spend your time to do quite difficult work, and most arguments around here are about why his work currently doesn't seem to pass that mark. EDIT: to put a number on how difficult engaging with the actual maths and physics would be, according to the article, the Wolfram Research Project has currently published 700 pages worth of discoveries. To be honest about my own feelings, when I see him claiming his new model will explain what mathematics is - it makes me think he's only a few years away from claiming it explains the meaning of life and why there is something instead of nothing. Perhaps even squaring the circle and computing the number of angels that fit on the head of a pin...
aj7 5y ago
You will find, I think, the gradient you allude to, to be inversely proportional to the level of physics that the reviewer has attained. Now this could have “political” implications: people with a lot invested in conventional physics might be hostile as a means of protecting that investment. But I think not.

ridaj 5y ago

The more I hear about Stephen Wolfram's schemes to name things after Stephen Wolfram, the more admirative I grow of Nicolas Bourbaki and wished he were publishing amazing math software these days.

froh 5y ago
You've sent me down an interesting reading path, about a group of mathematicians working under the pseudonym "Nicolas Bourbaki" and lo and behold they do even have a web site these days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki https://www.bourbaki.fr/ https://www.bourbaki.fr/ Now how does that relate to Stephen Wolfram?
- Cyph0n 5y ago
  A group of mathematicians operating under a pseudonym is basically the exact opposite of a single mathematician naming everything after himself.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Only until the pseudonym becomes famous and it's basically the same thing.
    - morelisp 5y ago
      The difference is capitalism. The name has some prestige, but it would be difficult for "Nicolas Bourbaki" to leverage "his" mathematical fame to accumulate wealth in a way that allows "him" to advocate a particularly fringe theory of, say, virology. Wolfram, on the other hand, can leverage Mathematica to get rich, and use his riches to continue to push NKS, despite zero (or less) interest from physicists.
      - emteycz 5y ago
        Nobody has to listen to Wolfram. Close his graphomaniac blog and forget about him. On the other hand, academic credit (not merit) will get you much further than money in many cases - and the lack of it (while not lacking merit) is a serious impediment on the progress of many scientific projects. The difference? Socialism. Wolfram uses his own taxed income to further his goals, while meritless scientists use the broken system of academia and the income from taxes (that should've been used to further real science) to accomplish theirs.

NumberCruncher 5y ago

Either he is onto something or not, but his ego is going to scare any sane person away.

sjg007 5y ago
You have to be a little crazy to work on something this ambitious for any length of time because it is not mainstream and probably hard to get grants for in the traditional sense. DNNs faced and still face enormous criticism from statisticians, mathematicians and it was only after proof of their utility that academics could no longer ignore them.

syats 5y ago

Let us concede that in the last 20 years, the number of mentions of "I" in his writing has decreased, and there are more mentions of "We". As much as a cellular automata, and computation in general, fan as I am, and after having read a fair amount of his work... I am still not convinced that Wolfram is not just a rich crack pot.

hyperpallium2 5y ago
Is he a genius or a crackpot? Yes.
tsimionescu 5y ago
To me that reads mostly like the royal "we", as in "We, Stephen Wolfram". Especially when saying things like "Wolfram Research has been geared towards making things we think up into products".
systemvoltage 5y ago
Let him do his thing, he supports many employees for a living, and does meaningful work occassionally. There are many people that are far more problematic for the society than Mr. Wolfram. He hasn't done any harm to anyone. Let him chill in peace.
- ginnungagap 5y ago
  > He hasn't done any harm to anyone. Reading posts from former employees and plagiarism accusations (look up Matthew Cook) suggests otherwise. I remember this being discussed on HN before as well, even though the search function is not bringing up anything.
  - mklarmann 5y ago
    I worked with Matthew Cook at ETH Zürich after he left wolfram for that reason. Cooks proof of the Turing completeness of the 110 rule [1] is in my opinion the only interesting piece in the new kind of science book. The dispute emerged from wolfram handling this not with science in mind, but capitalism. Putting an NDA on the publication of cook, to frame himself as the source. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

henrydark 5y ago

Is it though?

tzlanders 5y ago

tmsh 5y ago

Out of the thousand amazing breakthroughs in the history of science or mathematics I can think of zero that said they were in the text itself. Show not tell.

robotresearcher 5y ago
“It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” Watson and Crick’s one sentence paragraph towards the end of their 1.5-page paper on the structure of DNA, that explained the mechanism of heredity and thus evolution in living things, and won them a Nobel Prize. These guys didn’t take the opportunity to share the glory with Franklin that they should have, but they sure did render a wonderfully genteel understatement of the import of their work.
evilotto 5y ago
"The above proposition is occasionally useful." From Principia Mathematica, several hundred pages in, after proving that 1+1=2

d--b 5y ago

This is sad for whoever is signing up to work on this. The man is delusional. The claims of revolutionizing everything from physics to economics are a clear evidence that the man lost it. He’s just a guru now.

hosteur 5y ago
> The man is delusional. Why?
- poulpy123 5y ago
  Because he pretends to have a theory revolutioning all kinds of sciences, while not revolutioning even one. That's typical of crackpots

aj7 5y ago

I’ve had more downvotes sharing my opinions about cellular automata on HN than on any other topic, so I won’t make any here. Rather, I’d like to point out that I personally have not seen a single theory, not a single piece of a theory, known to be productive in explaining experimental data, recast with underlying cellular automata theory. If I am simply showing my ignorance, please enlighten me. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

aero-glide2 5y ago
I think it's a good thing to have a small percentage of scientists working on whacky theories, one of them might turn out to be true.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Plus it's not like Wolfram is taking resources away from other scientists as he is funded from his company. If Wolfram wasn't doing this he'd be CEO'ing his company, there's no cost to the public for Wolfram exploring this and potentially huge gains - though unlikely.
  - a_bonobo 5y ago
    There could be an opportunity costs, researchers working on this could be working on a different problem. Unlikely, but not impossible.
    - taylorius 5y ago
      I'm fairly sure Wolfram's researchers are working on it because they are interested, and want to do it.
  - abdullahkhalids 5y ago
    Money is not the only resource. Scientist time is another resource, and probably a lot more important when it comes to Physics. Any private venture such as this necessarily (a) takes up scientist time, (b) provides training to scientists that can be applied to other problems later on, (c) as a second order effect, molds the public's perception of science in a certain way. (a), (b) or (c) could individually be positive or negative to society. And their net could be positive or negative. I don't know what these values are for Wolfram's work, but we can definitely make this sort of nuanced analysis.

poulpy123 5y ago

I know that he has a lot of credentials (and more and better than mine) but it's still read like some crackpot science blog article

mycroftiv 5y ago

Good luck with this venture, I think a lot of minds have contributed to progress in these fields and sharing both the labors and the fruits is important.

bmc7505 5y ago

It must feel terribly vindicating to be shunned by IAS for pursuing unpopular research, ridiculed by your intellectual heroes for lacking social graces, branded a charlatan your entire professional career by the academic establishment despite running a profitable company for over three decades, then funding a rival institute to pursue the original research you had set out to do 40 years ago.

pretendscholar 5y ago
>branded a charlatan your entire professional career by the academic establishment despite running a profitable company for over three decades Those two features are not mutually exclusive.
- bmc7505 5y ago
  They are if your customers are mostly academic researchers.

Pilottwave 5y ago

Lots of comments about his "arrogance" but i just see someone passionate, judge for yourself! He has three long interviews on Lex Fridmans youtube channel! I greatly enjoyed watching those those. 1:[Stephen Wolfram: Cellular Automata, Computation, and Physics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA) 2:[Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t1_ffaFXao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t1_ffaFXao) 3: [Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality ](https://youtu.be/4-SGpEInX_c https://youtu.be/4-SGpEInX_c)

poulpy123 5y ago
You can be passionate and arrogant.
- WithinReason 5y ago
  He didn't seem arrogant to me from the Lex podcasts. He seems to have no problem admitting when he doesn't know something or when he was wrong. Maybe his overuse of the "I" pronoun gives the wrong impression?
  - poulpy123 5y ago
    More the overuse of his name to name other things and the fact he has been talking about revolutioning science for at least 2 facades without doing it.
    - poulpy123 5y ago
      *decades
      - cwilkes 5y ago
        I think façade fits better in this case
    - xhkkffbf 5y ago

karcass 5y ago

"Still not sure which will become self-aware first: Wolfram Alpha, or Stephen Wolfram"

jillesvangurp 5y ago

I have the man's magnum opus on my shelf. Cheeky graduation present from a friend. Never managed to enjoy reading it unfortunately but it makes for a great paper weight. I also occasionally use it as a laptop stand. It's big and heavy and oddly convenient for that. This press release is a bit long, incoherent, and manages an impressive number of buzzwords that I don't normally associate with cellular automata. Can somebody maybe translate this to English, filter out the narcissist self glorification and actually explain what it is this institute is planning to actually do? I bet it's something like cellular automata all the way down.

jongorer 5y ago
“Witness me”
comboy 5y ago
I recommend his Lex Friedman interviews on youtube. I've been reading and listening to Wolfram for some time and Lex manages to somehow get the most out of him. The ego is annoying and personally I don't think that New Kind of Science is very high in information density (may be my ignorance), but Wolfram definitely has many many great insights to offer if you are able to just ignore the remarks about him being the first in the world that did that 30 years ago in computer science, physics and biology. He did and keeps doing amazing things that are indeed much ahead of the competition. This is not a new pattern, I've posted this link before HN but I want to repeat it so many times [1] - we are standing on shoulders of jerks (I do not think Wolfram is a jerk btw, but people clearly have some problem with his way of being) 1. https://youtu.be/bsgWSPWX-6A?t=650 https://youtu.be/bsgWSPWX-6A?t=650
- disqard 5y ago
  I hadn't heard of the Intellectual Dark Web until just now. Thank you!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

jwildeboer 5y ago

The text really has some cult leadership vibes to it IMHO.

DantesKite 5y ago

Man these are some low-quality comments. You’d think Wolfram was torturing gerbils or something. I don’t mind criticisms of my favorite thinkers. I enjoy watching someone being taken to task in the battle of ideas so to speak, but apparently something about Wolfram just rubs people the wrong way, because they seem to lose the ability to make cogent arguments after reading him. As a simple example of what a healthy discussion could look like: Wolfram didn’t believe black holes were real for the longest time, or at least, had some skepticism about that. One could’ve had a reasonable debate, pointing out where he may have erred (up until he changed his mind). Like a proper scientist does. But vilifying him for wanting to create a research institute is absurd. I have never seen such petty anger at the idea of doing more scientific research. He’s done a fantastic job creating a new model for understanding reality, some of which suggest interesting physical structures underlying our Universe. He’s changed my understanding of evolution completely with his insights on computational irreducibility and complexity. And he’s laying the groundwork for understanding the meta-rules that undergird not just our Universe, but all possible Universes. It’s fantastic stuff. The great Richard Feynman himself frequently collaborated with Wolfram and talked about Rule 30, the foundational insight that spurred Wolfram to create a New Kind of Science. Calling him delusional or a fraud is Wittengtein’s Ruler in action: It says far more about you than it does about him. I always click on a Wolfram thread, and occasionally you do get interesting insights and even informed disagreements, but this is just disgraceful to be honest. There’s true evil in the world. Truly despicable sins. Calibrate your outrage towards that. If you disagree with Wolfram, read his work, steelman it, and show where it’s wrong in a way worthy of scientific skepticism and empiricism. Otherwise you’re worse than what you think he is.

throwaway81523 5y ago
> show where it’s wrong Do you know the expression "not even wrong"?
- m12k 5y ago
  They're trying to come up with a new way of modelling the foundations of physics. In order to be "even wrong", they need to make falsifiable predictions. As far as I can tell, they're not at (or claiming to be at) that level of maturity of the model, they seem to be slowly working toward feature parity with existing models. Whether they ever achieve that remains to be seen. Whether they manage to coalesce all this into a single coherent theory remains to be seen. Whether they manage to make novel, falsifiable predictions or not remains to be seen. And if they do, whether these predictions will be falsified or not also remains to be seen. Long story short, I don't see why being "not even wrong" at this phase is some great sin.

dinobones 5y ago

Cmd+F: "free speech" Oh thank god, it's not one of "those" institutes.

noizejoy 5y ago

Could be a fun ask HN: What would happen if Mr. Wolfram and Mr. Musk would have to share the same room for a while?

emteycz 5y ago
Tesla Model W would lift-off from that building after a short while. But seriously - I think they'd find a common language. Both are set in their ways and these ways are far from each other, but I don't think they'd fight, verbally or not.
isitmadeofglass 5y ago
Good question. Wolfram shared some time with Steve Jobs once and Mathematica happened. /jk of cause, but it actually was Jobs who came up with the idea for the name.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I know Mathematica was first on the NeXT, but never considered their meeting; anywhere I can read more about that?
  - isitmadeofglass 5y ago
    I believe that it’s mentioned in some of Wolframs blog posts, but my search failed me. But it’s covered by the guardian here https://amp.theguardian.com/theobserver/2011/dec/11/steve-jobs-obituary-stephen-wolfram https://amp.theguardian.com/theobserver/2011/dec/11/steve-jo...
gary_0 5y ago
One man emerges, twice as large.
farseer 5y ago
Things would get physical very quickly, probably ending with Musk strangling Wolfram due to his advanced age.

estevaoam 5y ago

I think Law of Jante summarizes the 'zeitgeist' of HN comments towards this man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante The goal should be always to understand and discuss ideas, despite egos. As hard that can be practically, anything else is unproductive and not worth persuing. His thoughts and theories are something to not ignore, but to follow with the same skepticism as any revolutionary claim should be. That should be irrespective of the author. But we need to give value to new ideas and have a small dose of optimism, that way we can be open to true innovation and paradigm shifts. But there is nothing bad that Wolfram's mind is powerful. I doubt anyone here would dare to try to create something as complicated as it's Wolfram service.

pretendscholar 5y ago
>Law of Jante summarizes the 'zeitgeist' Why do you feel the need to dress up your comment to be something more than "you guys are just jealous."? Most of the comments criticizing Wolfram in this comment section discuss A New Kind of Science, cellular automata and hypergraphs but yours has no reference to any of the ideas discussed. Your post fluffs Wolfram to an absurd degree without ever actually providing any specific idea that is revolutionary or great. >I doubt anyone here would dare to try to create something as complicated as it's Wolfram service. Complicated is not a virtue.
- estevaoam 5y ago
  With all due respect fellow HN reader, I never said his idea was great or revolutionary. When I posted my comment, most comments I read then haven't tried to discuss any specific points nor his ideas, and my comment was for those. Most were discrediting the guy just based on his personality. No matter how big this man's ego are, and I also think it is, he has proven himself a creator so far and to be passionate on those topics. For me, that's enough to not dismiss him as crazy or charlatan, especially so early. My main point here is not aimed to defend or "fluff" Wolfram – I don't care about him personally. It is only about how our society does not have a healthy culture on receiving new ideas. Let him and his team pursue his research – if this turns up to be something remarkable, time will show us – and humanity will benefit from it. I posted "Law of Jante" as I see this happening over and over again. Different contexts, same "boohoo, this person think they're better than us". >Complicated is not a virtue. That is not correct. Complicated just means a complex 'something'. If the complexity of 'something' is accidental or not, that is another topic and is not even subject to moral judgment IMO. Now, to develop complex software in a complex domain over several years, this is something hard and only someone sane can do that. So I'm just optimistic and open to see what his team will output from all this. Have a great weekend!

isitmadeofglass 5y ago

Sounds interesting And I’m looking forwards to seeing what this brings along.

dudeinjapan 5y ago

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they... I forget the rest but sometimes they just keep laughing at you for a long time.

shetill 5y ago

can someone TL;DR this?

schappim 5y ago

In spite of all the negativity, I admire Stephen because he has done what many of us want to achieve, namely: Billion dollar SW company that is privately owned, that now enables him to pursue his intellectual interests.

genis 5y ago

iiu

genis 5y ago
test

OOvsuOO 5y ago

Wolfram software is awesome! It beats any other software and it's why they charge for it. It's worth it. Education about computers, science and math made easier to manipulate. Fact based results. If you google something you get jumbled results. Wolfram either you get it right with some facts back at your query. Or you get nil. You can be confident that it's a fact staring at you. You can cross reference and check it too! that's something google can't do. Expand your world, try out Wolfram. Wolfram behooves truth it seems people are afraid of the truth. Hence the comments here. Being able to do your own research and learn programming. I haven't seen a better documentation for software compared to Wolfram's. He's beyond time in the future. Wolfram's software was used on the ISS to do some real world calculations to make a course correction. It helped me understand programming and computers. I look forward to wolfram adventures. Computer literacy can be understood and learned using Wolfram.

saberience 5y ago
This reads like a comment generated by Wolfram's version of GPT3 trained only on his own writing.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  Ram is Wolf. Wolf is Life. Life is Wolf Ram. - Michael GPT-3 Scott
  - OOvsuOO 5y ago
    Only a real human would understand the tone. And I received it.

infogulch 5y ago

The one thing that unites mathematicians throughout history and field is the pursuit of beauty. And by some happenstance the most beautiful theories are often found to be useful in the real world. Human beings are embedded and embodied in this admittedly beautiful fractally complex existence. Somehow it doesn't seem surprising for us to be attracted to patterns that can manifest in our reality. If anything, finite automata are beautiful.

tokai 5y ago

It's interesting with the sycophant outrage over criticism of Wolfram. With arguments ala "criticise his work not his person". But if you actually follow his work (scientific work, not his business) it is clear that there is a lot to critique, but not in a useful sense. Scholarly reviews of A New Kind of Science were universally negative. The usefulness of what he proposes is doubtful and it is unoriginal. He is unable to engage with other scientists in a way that furthers his program. And he is know to use academic shadow writers. I can't wrap my head a around why anyone would defend a self-centred entrepreneur that purchase the scientific relevance he couldn't work up organically (Sending thousands of copies of your own book to academic libraries all over the world is very much not in the spirit of science).

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
With HN's obsession with “founders” of startups, it's perhaps not surprising that Wolfram gets so much sympathy here. It's hero worship. I think Wolfram is a victim of his own success. His achievements in software have let him avoid the necessary humility in being an academic.
- m12k 5y ago
  > that Wolfram gets so much sympathy here. Are we reading the same comments? My impression is that 80%-90% are negative toward him.
  - tokai 5y ago
    The three top comments here are positive.
sjg007 5y ago
Neural networks were basically negatively critiqued for decades. I think there is something to cellular automata and there's definitely a relationship between CAs and DNNs that is unexplored.
- 5y ago

peterweyand0 5y ago

The idea that cellular automaton can form a foundation for physics that mathematics can't seems incredibly unlikely. Mathematica is a useful program, but his claims are a bit over the top compared to the critiques from fellow scientists.

sjg007 5y ago
Well all CAs are math so I am not sure what you mean here. CAs are basically state space in time models that may exhibit some general predictable behaviors that can be described by math.
daneelsan 5y ago
I'm not sure why comments mention CA. His physics theory and the multicomputation stuff does not make use of CA's (at least no more than any other abstract machine).

ThePhysicist 5y ago

Stephen Wolfram basically lives my dream as an "entrepreneurial scientist". He is successful in academia and business and has his own money to fund his own research ideas. I am nowhere near as prolific as he is but I have to admire him for how he managed to pursue his dreams.

mrjangles 5y ago

I don't understand all these comments saying "Sure Wolfram may be arrogant, but he has achieved amazing things". "lets look at his work and ideas not him as a person". ... What does this even mean? Steven Wolfram has never achieved a single thing in science or mathematics. Absolutely no one has ever said otherwise, except for Steven Wolfram himself. I used to think he was a failed scientist who, at least, was good with computers and software, but after seeing the decline in the quality of Mathematica, and the hairbrain schemes he has been leading there instead of improving his core software, it has become clear to me that he wasn't even the one responsible for Mathematica being so great, and whoever it was has now left the company.

daneelsan 5y ago
Didn't he invent a numbering schema for classifying CA? That should count as an achievement.
- mrjangles 5y ago
  The fact that no one could possibly have a clue what this sentence means is a pretty good indication of how important this work was.
  - daneelsan 5y ago
    OK bud
posix_me_less 5y ago
Feynman wrote something in the sense Wolfram did invent an interesting way to implement quantum chromodynamics on a computer, so he did something contributory to science.
- mrjangles 5y ago
  You are going to need a very specific citation for that because, if he did, no one working in physics today has heard of it.

simne 5y ago

I have question: how I could use data from Wolfram pages with opensource software, best with Python libraries?

westurner 5y ago

What an excellent article title. [edit] Perchance, why? Why is the Wolfram Institute Necessary?

kalimanzaro 5y ago

https://youtu.be/F3hPvusB0ds https://youtu.be/F3hPvusB0ds For those who are turned off by "cerebritiesh" (pronounced the way Taleb fan of Wolfie would, or perhaps Sean Connery if he had the chance to meet the old dog in person) But who secretly indulge in Nobel laureate fanboyism Here is a video of 't Hooft talking about cell autos & quanta. I don't understand it but boy am I happy to see properly labelled figures for self-styled adults. Dutch prof has the homely charm of mashed potatoes which goes well with dreams of Illinois corn fields (near the Wolfie homebase) should you fall asleep

bigbillheck 5y ago

Say what you like about Wolfram, and I know I certainly have, but in his defense he appears to have not been personally connected to Jeffery Epstein.

ergonaught 5y ago

I’m not hating on the man, as I do not care enough about him or his alleged behaviors or alleged personality traits to hate any of it, but let’s all be honest here and recognize that we’ve reached the “Is it GPT-3 or is it Stephen Wolfram?” singularity. He produces enormous, voluminous, prodigious quantities of words, usually built around a very interesting core prompt, that seem to imply that they may point to something that will definitely be significant, using words that certainly carry a suggested context of the scent of sciencemath, and this goes on forever, but goes nowhere. You can definitely be smarter and see farther and clearer than your critics and your peers, but at the “end of the day” you have to deliver something actionable, a result, a real change. Where has this occurred?

codethief 5y ago
> let’s all be honest here and recognize that we’ve reached the “Is it GPT-3 or is it Stephen Wolfram?” singularity. Damn, that's such a great way of putting it!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Invictus0 5y ago

How can anyone read this and admire this man? 'A new paradigm' this, I I I that.

Traster 5y ago

I've read through this very carefully and it's very difficult for me to understand what exactly he thinks is a breakthrough. Generally when we're talking about breakthroughs in physics in theoretical physics we're often talking about a new idea that links previous ideas, or an emergent property from a theory that we can then test. I've read a bit about it, and it seems to boil down to "Model things as a graph and simple set of rules about how that graph changes over time steps", and doing this if you plug in the right stuff you get something you recognise from somewhere else in physics. Which seems both unsurprising, and not a break through? It's like an ML problem, you don't get credit for predicting things that have already happened. Does anyone know where this approach is pushing forward the totality of physics?

jfengel 5y ago
He seems to believe that trying to base science in terms of cellular automata will turn up something new and interesting. It hasn't yet, but he sees hints that similar patterns crop up at a wide variety of scales when you frame it the way he does. Few scientists seem to agree with him on that, and it hasn't produced any novel results. To borrow an old joke, "His book contains much that is new and much that is interesting. But that which is new is not interesting, and that which is interesting is not new." Nothing seems to have been forthcoming in the decades since it was published. On the other hand, he produced at least one very important thing in the past, and presumably has gobs of money. So he's welcome to pursue his idea. Most scientists don't think it will pan out, but it's his time and his money to waste. He's trying to recruit people, and I would caution that it's probably a waste of time -- as would people far more qualified than me. Still... it's also their time to spend/waste.

Tr3nton 5y ago

I've been hearing/seeing Stephen Wolfram's name for about 2 decades. Each time I see it, it's associated with some supposed incredible breakthrough in math, science, physics, or perhaps a combination of those; and that's it. There's never any application to the real world, there's never any great discovery that enlightens or improves the common man's life. You could argue I'm not smart enough to understand his work, but I could argue he's not smart enough to make the importance of his work comprehensible to dumb people like me.

ChadNauseam 5y ago
Well, the majority of academic work in physics is not at all enlightening to the "common man". And yet Wolfram's career has benefited and enlightened the common man 100x more than the average academic through Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica alone.

Barrera 5y ago

> Something remarkable has happened these past two years. For 45 years I’ve devoted myself to building a taller and taller tower of science and technology—which along the way has delivered many outputs of which I’m quite proud. But starting in 2020 with the unexpected breakthroughs of our Wolfram Physics Project we’ve jumped to a whole new level. And suddenly—yes, building on our multi-decade tower—it seems as if we’ve found a new paradigm that’s incredibly powerful, and that’s going to let us tackle an almost absurd range of longstanding questions in all sorts of areas of science. An author who sets a piece up like that had better deliver the goods - big time. The author does not. You might expect that "new paradigm" of his to have rocked the scientific world. It hasn't. The big idea is: "Multicomputation." And despite voluminous writing on the topic it's nothing more than noodling cellular automata in ways that have had no effect whatsoever on chemistry, physics, or biology.

narrator 5y ago
I'd say that gradient descent and deep learning have made obsolete whatever cellular automata stuff Wolfram has come up with. Neural nets can approximate any function. Cellular automata has a much more limited range that only includes the generation of some interesting pictures and not much else of interest, IMHO. To be charitable, if he had some way to mathematically slide between and combine networks of cellular automata, he might have something, but it would probably just end up reinventing deep learning and neural nets on a slightly different set of primitives.
- Stupulous 5y ago
  Cellular automata can be Turing complete, so they cover at least the entire range of a neural net, and more if it's not recurrent.
kspacewalk2 5y ago
>An author who sets a piece up like that had better deliver the goods - big time. The author does not. That's been my impression of Stephen Wolfram and what he does in general. He has some accomplishments but his ego is comically large by comparison with those. Very hard to take him seriously.

gavinray 5y ago

Could anyone ELI5 the general ideas that Wolfram has been talking about the last few years? I read the (original) announcement post, and the visuals are very interesting and full of neat geometric structures but it's so far over my head I haven't a clue what he's talking about. It's some sort of theory about fundamental structures/relationships that underlie "everything"? How mathematically viable/potentially-legitimate is this? His work doesn't read like a nutjob to me but I also don't have the credibility to judge.

circlefavshape 5y ago

Did anyone else read this hoping for an invitation for nerds like us to Do Awesome Science and Change The World? Disappointed

baggiponte 5y ago

Definitely would achieve more if he open sourced mathematica

daneelsan 5y ago
Would it be profitable, though?

georgewfraser 5y ago

Wolfram wolfram wolfram wolfram! Wolfram’s wolfram wolfram, wolfram wolfram. Wolfram wolfram? Wolfram wolfram wolfram wolfram.

lioeters 5y ago
Looks like you've discovered the Wolfram Calculus, a universal model of computation in which all the laws of physics can be derived from the simple, irreducible existence of Wolfram, the Self of all selves.

fbanon 5y ago

Stephen Woflram have been pushing his cellular automata for 20 years now (A New Kind of Science came out in 2002). Can you point me to a single useful result that came out of it?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dannykwells 5y ago

I came across this today: https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/all/ https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/all/ "Note: Since 1987, Stephen Wolfram’s intellectual efforts have not primarily been reported in academic articles." To be clear - no serious scientist believes that a scholarly output which is composed predominantly of non-peer reviewed publications is a serious or valid output. Essentially, Wolfram is a glorified blogger who runs a tech company. That's not nothing, but it doesn't make someone a scientific leader.

michael_j_ward 5y ago
Ideas being subjected to peer review != the institutionalized "Peer Review Process(TM)"
- dannykwells 5y ago
  Ideas being subjected to peer review \approx the institutionalized "Peer Review Process(TM)"

j7ake 5y ago

What’s with the hate? Let the man do his research. It’s not tax payer dollars. The number of tax-dollar paid academics who are doing research as “useless” as his (useless defined by the haters) vastly outnumber the ones at Wolfram.

michael_j_ward 5y ago
Alan Kay has part of the answer in this talk [0] where elucidates the errors taken by formal Comp Sci education. He claims there was a battle in the university between testable curriculum centered around Algorithms and builder curriculums based around hardware and distributed systems, and says it's a shame that algorithms won out. [0] Alan Kay : July 2007 : A Conversation with CMU Faculty & Students https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8
- disqard 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing that link!

TheMagicHorsey 5y ago

I'm not smart enough to judge work of such momentous significance. Is this for real, or is this guy a wealthy quack? It just seems like I would have heard more about it if it was real. Or are we living through a Galileo moment where a genius is laboring outside the established institutions and is closer to the truth than the establishment? My neo-cortex is just not capable enough to judge these things, but I hope smarter people here can chime in.

DonBarredora 5y ago

This guy is so full of himself. He is going to explode anytime.

kkfx 5y ago

I like to a certain extent and admire Mathematica and Alpha (I dislike their closeness) BUT one thing I fear are "centered universities", by their own name they MUST be universal so public and open, not backed by anyone in particular. That's remain the same for anything alike. BTW for those who read French I suggest: Libérez votre cerveau! by Idriss Aberkane on teaching and developing knowledge.

RenTech 5y ago

https://dockets.justia.com/docket/alabama/alndce/5:2021cv00418/176632 https://dockets.justia.com/docket/alabama/alndce/5:2021cv004... He's just running out the back door because of this case...

narratorr 5y ago