4 ms·

Last I heard about Stephen Wolfram (10-15 years ago) he had gone down a rabbit hole of trying to use cellular automata to model all of reality. I guess this "ru

Last I heard about Stephen Wolfram (10-15 years ago) he had gone down a rabbit hole of trying to use cellular automata to model all of reality. I guess this "ruliad" concept is where he ended up. I can never figure out whether there's any actual substance there -- every time something of his gets posted it's a long, abstract article that links to multiple other long, abstract articles, but I never get any sense of something like "...and this is how you get special relativity" or "this is how you get Maxwell's Equations", or even something abstract but relatively concise like Noether's Theorem. Maybe I just don't know enough higher math and physics -- is there a more concrete explanation of any of this?

SkyMarshal 5y ago
Same. He really needs to learn how to omit the hype and self-aggrandizement and reduce his articles down to their scientific essence only. Stop burying the lede and put the main ideas in an abstract, then develop, support and critique them in the text. That would reduce their length by roughly 50% and increase their readability and information density immeasurably. For all its faults, this is one thing the academic scientific publishing system does well. He needs to just let his work speak for itself, instead of trying to be a salesman for it. His inability or unwillingness to do that is negative signal, no matter how positively he phrases it. I continue waiting with an open mind to see if his techniques produce any kind of predictive theories. But without testable predictions, there's no way of knowing if ruliads and the like are a new and useful representation of reality, or just the rules for an alternate simulation wholely different from and unconnected to our reality. It would be really cool if they turn out to be the former, and he's figured out a new symbolic+computational representation of Maxwell's equations and relativity. But we'll see.
motoboi 5y ago
I remember reading something concrete last year maybe was this: https://www.wolframphysics.org/bulletins/2020/05/event-horizons-singularities-and-other-exotic-spacetime-phenomena/ https://www.wolframphysics.org/bulletins/2020/05/event-horiz...

SkyMarshal 5y ago

Same. He really needs to learn how to omit the hype and self-aggrandizement and reduce his articles down to their scientific essence only. Stop burying the lede and put the main ideas in an abstract, then develop, support and critique them in the text. That would reduce their length by roughly 50% and increase their readability and information density immeasurably. For all its faults, this is one thing the academic scientific publishing system does well. He needs to just let his work speak for itself, instead of trying to be a salesman for it. His inability or unwillingness to do that is negative signal, no matter how positively he phrases it. I continue waiting with an open mind to see if his techniques produce any kind of predictive theories. But without testable predictions, there's no way of knowing if ruliads and the like are a new and useful representation of reality, or just the rules for an alternate simulation wholely different from and unconnected to our reality. It would be really cool if they turn out to be the former, and he's figured out a new symbolic+computational representation of Maxwell's equations and relativity. But we'll see.

motoboi 5y ago

I remember reading something concrete last year maybe was this: https://www.wolframphysics.org/bulletins/2020/05/event-horizons-singularities-and-other-exotic-spacetime-phenomena/ https://www.wolframphysics.org/bulletins/2020/05/event-horiz...