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Wolfram deserves accolades for Mathematica. It's a magnificent achievement and he's kept his company alive and thriving and people use Wolfram (the company) too
by crispyambulance 5y ago
Wolfram deserves accolades for Mathematica. It's a magnificent achievement and he's kept his company alive and thriving and people use Wolfram (the company) tools everyday to do productive stuff.
BUT... Wolfram (the man) is very much an outsider when it comes to physics. This started 20 years ago when he published a "A New Kind of Science". It was a lengthy but ultimately not useful exploration of cellular automata (some of the fractal-like graphics were pretty cool at the time, but that's about it). Even that was perfectly fine, a rich guy with a vanity hobby doing some weird but interesting stuff, so what?
But lately he's really doubled down on the "theory of everything" stuff with his "hypergraph" idea. To be honest, it IS a bit cringe-worthy. To call this pursuit "The Fundamental Theory of Physics"... geezus, that takes a level of ego that makes one's mouth drop.
But you know what, it's still fine. It's not like he is applying for grants and competing with other worthwhile science for funding. His "staff" for this endeavor are his paid employees. AFAIK, he has no collaborators in academia (and no, multi-hour Twitch streams where he firehoses PHD level math jargon to the general public DON'T COUNT as collaboration).
Now he wants to launch an institute? Still fine by me as long as the funding it comes out of Wolfram's pocket and doesn't detract from more worthwhile non-vanity research.
- motoboi 5y agoI suppose you are not familiar with his early career as a physicist, publishing in the field since he was 15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram#Early_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram#Early_career
- gammarator 5y agoThat doesn’t tell us much about the quality of the work under discussion.
- motoboi 5y agoNo. But I'm replying to the OP argument that his physics career began with the book.
- crispyambulance 5y agoNo, I was trying to say that the book was when he first demonstrated that he was very much an outsider. Even by then he had been out of academia for a long time, busy building his company and making his fortune.
- crispyambulance 5y agoThat was 40+ years ago.
- xhkkffbf 5y agoIt may or may not be correct, but to get hung up on the ego and the name on the paper is a big mistake. Read the ideas. Maybe they're too weird to understand. But don't condemn them because where they came from. Find the flaws and do it scientifically.
- Adraghast 5y agoThere are only so many hours in a day. If we spend all of them thoroughly debunking known quacks nothing else will ever get done. Stephen Wolfram hasn’t yet achieved full quack status where it’s best to dismiss him out of hand, but he has been moving in that direction for some time.
- crispyambulance 5y agoIt's an interesting idea but it's still very nascent and speculative. In these last couple of years, Wolfram has been talking about a "universe building kit". He posits that universes (including our own universe) and it's time evolution can be described by relatively simple "hypergraph" that modifies itself and that fully describes physical laws including the concepts that would unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. His thinking is that we just have to somehow "find" that hypergraph and we'll know everything all the way back to "t=0". Not surprisingly, the physics community doesn't seem interested in dropping whatever they're doing and pursuing this. But like I said, it's OK. The only gripe I would have is if he started trying to getting funding from sources which other scientific researchers use now. The concern is that he would just roll out his obscurantist papers and talks and convince people with the purse-strings to fork over money for this idea that COULD HAVE GONE towards more legitimate pursuits. As it is now, high-energy physics already gets what many consider to be "too much" funding and it's been rather fruitful. This hypergraph stuff... meh.