4 ms·

It 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. B

It 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 ago
There 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 ago
It'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.

4 ms·

It 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. B

by xhkkffbf 5y ago

Adraghast 5y ago
There 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 ago
It'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.