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A 50-year quest: My personal journey with the second law of thermodynamics
- fsckboy 4y agothis link is > part 2 in a 3-part series about the Second Law: > 1. Computational Foundations for the Second Law of Thermodynamics > 2. A 50-Year Quest: My Personal Journey with the Second Law of Thermodynamics > 3. How Did We Get Here? The Tangled History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics conundrum: 1. can i win by starting with part 2? 2. will I have a better chance of breaking even if I start with part 1? https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/computational-foundations-for-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/computational-fo... 3. do I have to read part 3? time to find out...
- ur-whale 4y agoYou could help everyone else win by letting us know of your findings.
- Stratoscope 4y agoIt sounds like you already know the answer! You can't win. You can't break even. And you can't get out of the game.
- fsckboy 4y agofor n00bs who don't get the joke but will enjoy it, the 3 laws of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, have famously been paraphrased as a casino where [maybe think of this like building a perpetual motion machine] (1) you can't win [if you build a perpetual motion machine, don't expect it to generate extra power to run other things] (2) you can't break even [you can't even build a perpetual motion machine cuz friction etc.] (3) you have to play the game [your entire life is like a failed perpetual motion machine, you only survive by killing other things and even so you're going to run down and die, along with the rest of the universe] but it suffuses everything, more than just perpetual motion machines, like if your coffee water has sugar dissolved in it, don't expect it to climb out and reform crystals, and if you have sugar crystals, it's just going to dissolve itself in humidity in the air, and you can neither stop nor make these things happen. If you think you can, if you figure out a way to get the chaotic dissolved sugar back out of the water as organized crystals (rock candy!), that only happens if you have created even more chaos (evaporating the liquid water, burning carbon to heat the water, etc.) along the way.
- wombatpm 4y agoI've heard it as : 1) You can't win 2) In a perfect universe you could break even 3) The universe isn't perfect
- boole1854 4y agoI would recommend starting with Part 1, rather than Part 2 (which was linked). Here is Part 1: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/computational-foundations-for-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/computational-fo... Wolfram's ability to create interesting visualizations is fantastic. But I seem to feel underwhelmed at the significance of his discovery. In short, he says that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a consequence of the fact that we as observers are computationally bounded and cannot perceive all the details in the the lower-level, computationally irreducible physical systems around us. Yet this does not seem enormously different, or perhaps not different at all, than the standard account in statistical mechanics in which the observer is considered to be coarse-graining over the fine details of the system which are too complex to track. What is new in Wolfram's approach other than using computation-related labels to describe the situation? For example, his 'computationally bounded' observer is just the standard 'coarse-graining', right?
- dkural 4y agoYou are right. There is nothing new here.
- kgwgk 4y ago> I would recommend starting with Part 1, rather than Part 2 (which was linked) I think part 2 is much more interesting. If anyone starts with part 1 and decides to give up on it I would recommend that they give part 2 a chance. The subject and the style are quite different.
- smohare 4y ago[dead]
- onos 4y agoI don’t follow everything he figured out / discussed here. But the man is definitely a genius, and through Mathematica alone has had an immense impact on science. Appreciate the link, it was refreshing to read a bit of his life.
- throw_pm23 4y agoIf you don't follow, how can you tell that he is definitely a genius [sic] ? This is a dangerous pattern of thinking that led to scams like FTX or Bernie Madoff.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y agoI'm not sure anyone could differentiate Wolfram's own writing from what ChatGPT fine tuned on Wolfram might generate. He has a very distinctive way of writing. So, it makes you wonder does that make ChatGPT smart since Wolfram says he's smart, or does it make Wolfram dumb since he's just an LLM ?
- sammalloy 4y agoThis is something I’ve observed as well, and is noticeable not just in his written work, but also in his interviews.
- frob 4y agoThis is the feeling I have every time I read Wolfram's writing. It seems deep when first approached, but is ultimately a superficial rewording of established knowledge.
- Swizec 4y agoAfter listening to a podcast where he explains his approach in more depth, I think the value is in that he [tries to] construct the ideas from scratch. That they sound like “superficial rewording” is, I think, great evidence that the knowledge is either fundamentally true or the best humans can do. It’s like when avionics use independent systems to make decisions. If all the systems agree, they’re probably right. The value is in independent parallel construction of the same result.
- diego898 4y agoThank you for this. I don’t see many generous readings of Wolframs writings. HN is very dismissive of almost everything of his that ever makes the front page. As someone who doesn’t know enough to really know if he’s right or wrong, it’s hard to fully believe the HN view that he’s a transparent Charleston (and easy to spot at that) considering his history. It’s helpful to see a “positive” read of him and gives me more to think about so thank you! Can you link/mention the podcast?
- mellosouls 4y agoI don’t see many generous readings of Wolframs writings. HN is very dismissive of almost everything of his that ever makes the front page. This sounds like the scepticism here is unfair. You need to consider that if somebody establishes a reputation for using their reasonably well-known (and justifiably respected) position as an academic software developer to publicise dubious and grandiose scientific theories to gullible techies and pop-sci readers, rather than submitting them to be evaluated by experts through the normal scientific process, it seems pretty miniscule beer in comparison to have some pushback in threads like this.
- nautilius 4y ago
- kleiba 4y agoYeah, I guess that's the kind of stuff a boy had to back in the day before they invented tiktok...
- lisper 4y agoI am ever more impressed with Wolfram's ability to obfuscate and self-aggrandize. The second law is very easy to understand when presented as Boltzmann formulated it, and Shannon later generalized it: the entropy of a system is the (log of the) number of states that system could possibly be in given a set of values we can actually measure. In a gas, for example, we can measure its volume, temperature, and pressure, but that still leaves a lot of possible actual underlying configurations of the gas particles. The more possible configurations there are, the greater the entropy. And this explains the second law: given a set of measurement values, the more states there are which produce those values, the more likely we are, all else being equal, to observe those values. And so a closed system will evolve by pure chance into a state where the entropy is maximized simply because you are more likely to observe values corresponding to greater numbers of underlying states. That's really all there is to it on a conceptual level.
- kurthr 4y agoWell you're giving the statistical mechanics explanation (or information theory), which some thermodynamicists don't appreciate so much, but... I totally agree. Even in person we would joke that his ego filled an entire room, and that's before he got famous. Thank you for reading it so I didn't have to.
- lisper 4y ago> some thermodynamicists don't appreciate so much Why?
- krastanov 4y agoYou do not need statistical physics to define entropy. In fact, entropy as a concept was introduced long before statistical physics was a thing. Being able to do thermodynamics without invoking anything related to statistical physics is very valuable tool in mathematical physics, as it leads to definitions and proofs that rely on way fewer assumptions. People should not claim they understand entropy if they understand only the statistical physics way of introducing it. The deep value of the concept of entropy comes from understanding how the two completely unrelated definitions (in thermodynamics and in statistical physics) are equivalent. Edit to add: In statistical physics you rely on the idea of equivalent microstates. In thermodynamics you do not introduce anything about the microscopic structure of the system under study (an extremely valuable way to generalize your results to cases not covered by typical stat physics assumptions), rather you introduce the zeroth law of thermodynamics as an axiom.
- nabla9 4y agoWolfram was a child prodigy, became successful businessman and created Mathematica. He just desperately wants to be more. What is left of him as a scientist is just clever crank and eternal wannabe. All his books and projects in the last 20 years, from "A new kind of science" onward are just obfuscating, hand-waving and playing with "digital mud" getting nowhere. Excellent visualizations of overly complex things hide the fact that he finds no deep new science or explanations.
- paulpauper 4y agoWhat is left of him as a scientist is just clever crank and eternal wannabe. All his books and projects in the last 20 years, from "A new kind of science" onward are just obfuscating, hand-waving and playing with "digital mud" getting nowhere. Yeah I am as unimpressed by his automata theory now as I was 20 years ago.
- superposeur 4y agoI have trouble reconciling the insanely impressive pre-mid-80s Wolfram with the post-80s Wolfram. All his productions before a certain time are touched with brilliance and a preternatural orderliness of mind (including Mathematica, which was a groundbreaking and beautiful piece of software). Then he started making pictures of cellular automata.
- nabla9 4y agoego + no high quality feedback -> intellectual doom Guy is trapped inside his own mind and can't get out. Even independent researchers need scientific community to spar with. If you can't explain your thought simply to your peers (followers don't count) maybe you are lost. Same thing with Erik Weinstein. Left academia early to do something else, became rich. When he finally published the outline of the great thing he had been working for decades, someone easily spotted the errors and that was it.
- paulpauper 4y agoYeah he never talks about his theory anymore. Amazing how sudden that went from 100 to 0. Same for him applying gauge theory to the CPI, which also went splat and never to be spoken of again. The reality is, these concepts have engendered a significant and dense literature .The odds of being an outsider and just upending it are close to nil, even if you are brilliant. Sure Einstein did, how often does that happen?
- nabla9 4y agoEinstein was not isolated or outsider genius. He was a young physicist who didn't get academic position. Einstein's best friend Marcel Grossmann was a mathematician specializing in differential geometry and tensor calculus. Those were exactly the tools he needed for his breakthrough. Grossmann was important facilitator for Einstein. There were others. "Olympia Academy" and his wife for example.
- svnt 4y agoI think he mistakenly decided, reinforced by a lot of outside feedback, that he alone was personally responsible for his ability to respond to and record brilliant ideas. He failed to recognize that he was primarily exceptional in his preparation for, and early participation in, a brilliant collective of individuals. When he left the collective, his limited individual capacity left him chasing instead of leading.
- brutusborn 4y agoMaybe someone can explain this to me: I (naively) interpret Wolframs theories as trying to generate the observed continuous rules of physics from discrete rules. Thus the value in his approach is that it investigates the possibility that space-time is discrete with the hope that this can reveal something novel about the universe. Am I misunderstanding something? I get the feeling that the criticism of his work is because he hasn’t found anything new yet, but that doesn’t mean his computational paradigm isn’t useful and/or simply interesting?
- tsimionescu 4y agoI don't think that's right. He's trying to find a computational model that reproduces the rules of physics (including those of quantum mechanics, notably the infamous Born rule with its randomness) from a small set of computational laws. He expects this to also lead to a unification of GR with QM, fixing the biggest hole in physics that has eluded us. One significant aspect of his program is also to restate all of the laws of physics in terms of computational transformations, instead of differential equations.
- brutusborn 4y agoThanks for replying. I’m still a bit confused. Isn’t the main difference between his computational transformations and differential equations that they are discrete?
- tsimionescu 4y agoThey are also an entirely different mathematical framework. I'm not even sure if Wolfram's model is discrete (there are continuous models of computation, for example) . But even if they were fully isomorphic, they still represent a different way of thinking about the problem. Also, I believe he is looking for some base rules that are different from those of QM, thus leading to a theory that is not consistent with QM, but makes similar experimental predictions.
- aj7 4y agoTrying to find… Yet here’s an entire book…
- airesearcher 4y agoI disagree with the disdainful posts about Wolfram here. Sounds like insider vs. outsider politics, jealousy, or lack of actually reading and understanding Wolfram's work. His recent Physics Project is fascinating and original - and seems to be converging on some interesting discoveries.
- mathematicaster 4y agoPersonally, I find it just takes the willingness to actively separate his exposition of the concepts (whether novel or not) from his self-evaluation. It helps me to keep in mind his own admission of being quite egocentric (something like: "After all I am part of the club of those that named their company after themselves").
- jjeaff 4y agoDoes an admission of guilt make a thief more palatable? Even if he keeps thieving?
- 082349872349872 4y agoIt's been 20 years since NKS; please let us know in 2044 how you still feel about the "seems to be converging on" part? (if you want a connection between mathematical physics and informatics, I'd suggest looking at quantales before cellular automata) Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6rVHr6OwjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6rVHr6OwjI
- paulpauper 4y agoThis has to be the smartest person I have ever seen in terms of precocity. I knew his background was exceptional but at 13 he was essential an expert at physics. damn impressive. Imagine if he was born in the 2000s and having access to the internet and cheap computing. Up there with Von Nuemann..another one.
- throw_pm23 4y agoKeep in mind that you are not reading the account of an impartial outside observer, but of the subject himself. We think von Neumann was smart not because von Neumann himself said so.
- mlajtos 4y agoWhile Wolfram is objectively crazy smart, I don’t think he’s on the level of von Neumann.
- throw_pm23 4y agoYou seem to be agreeing with what I wrote.
- aj7 4y agoNo no no.
- epistemer 4y agoI think that underestimates the massive amount of distractions a person had to deal with being born in 2000. I can remember being bored out of my mind and so practicing Bach on guitar for hours in 1990. There is just no way I would have done that in 2015. That feeling was gone forever the first time my modem connected to the internet. It wouldn't be shocking that the intellectual giants of old became so because they had nothing much else to do but read and think. I do put Wolfram in the same league as Von Nuemann in terms of not being ashamed to admit they are beyond me. I can distinctly remember getting New Kind of Science from the library, getting home and then quickly realizing there is no chance in hell I can read a 1000 pages of this.
- gizajob 4y ago[flagged]
- Kukumber 4y agoYet again, one mustn't go against the "american exceptionalism"[1] dogma, that's sad to hear The result of this ego-centric americanism; Russia able to develop their supersonic weapons before anyone in the west, thanks to the work of the silenced non-US scientists [2] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn8b3E9oUHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn8b3E9oUHY
- hota_mazi 4y agoThere is no question that Wolfram is gifted for math and physics but his reputation for exaggerating claims is well known by now, and hearing him casually say that he was mulling over the second law of thermodynamics at age 12 makes me go "Yeah, right".
- mathematicaster 4y agoI have met several people telling weaker versions of that or similar claims. I believe them. A more accessible example is to intuit fairly early what computational irreducibility is. Typically one doesn't develop the language to be precise about these ideas until much later. That Wolfram had the correct language available at that age doesn't strike me as unlikely.
- cma 4y agoThat claim seems like not a stretch at all, he had published quantum physics papers at 15.
- alister 4y ago> Curiously enough, looking at the numbers now, I realize that the base speed of the LARC was only 20x the Elliott 903C, though with floating point, etc.—a factor that pales in comparison with the 500x speedup in computers in the 40 years since I started working on cellular automata. 500x? Shouldn’t the speedup over 40 years be something between 10,000x (increase in single-threaded performance) and 1,000,000x (increase in number of transistors).
- throwaway81523 4y agoYeesh, we should all remember the von Neumann quip "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." That certainly applies to rule 30. There is a deep mathematical theory of random sequences in which this stuff is not random at all. "Kolmogorov randomness" (incompressibility by any Turing machine) is "1-random", but beyond that there is 2-random, 3-random, etc. (incompressibility by machines with higher order halting orders), up through the countable transfinite ordinals if I understand it right. The book "Algorithmic Randomness and Complexity" by Downey and Hirschfeldt goes into all of this. It is way beyond this rule 30 stuff.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoI have found a new algorithm that is remarkably simple but seems capable of generating the entire written works of Stephen Wolfram (and possibly those not yet written). while (true) { if (random() % (random() % 19)) { printf ("me "); } else { printf ("i "); } }
- ksaxena 4y agoTLDR (using Kagi): https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/a-50-year-quest-my-personal-journey-with-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics/ https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://writings.stephenwol...
- college_physics 4y agoHe tried his best with an intriguing idea (a discrete, information theoretic basis for the physical universe). By all accounts the program did not deliver. At two levels: first at the obvious target, reinterpeting the existing body of knowledge and possibly predicting and explaining new things. But also important, the program did not produce mental tools (e.g., mathematical structures or other concepts) that maybe somebody else might adopt and try a new, more productive, approach. This doesnt mean the original idea will forever fail to be relevant. (Though other "deep insights" of Wheeler, like geometrodynamics, also did not pan out.) The life of ideas evolving in our collective mental spaces is poorly correlated with the biological lifespans of the 'carriers' and even more so with their human needs and feelings.
- tlocke 4y agoWolfram is right to draw attention to a puzzle in physics: why does the universe as a whole seem to be getting more ordered, but the 2nd law of thermodynamics suggests it should become more disordered? Julian Barbour's solution to this puzzle is to point out that the second law only applies to a system 'in a box'. The universe is not 'in a box' and so the second law doesn't apply to the universe as a whole.
- ianburrell 4y agoWhat makes you think that the universe is getting more ordered? It might look that way if you look at visible stuff and ignore the waste heat. Stars are giant entropy sources throwing out light and plasma. On planets, that light can be used for work, making life, but nearly all of it ends up as heat. Also, the 2nd law of thermodynamics is only about thermodynamics. Other forces, like gravity squishing things or strong force making fusion can provide order and extra energy. But it is temporary, there will eventually be no more gas to collect and fuse. Then all there is cooling off into the void.
- codingquark 4y agoI recommend reading part 3 at least. It will show how we came to take the second law as a theorem without ever having proved it formally. Read it the following order: 1. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/01/how-did-we-get-here-the-tangled-history-of-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/01/how-did-we-get-h... 2. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/computational-foundations-for-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/computational-fo... 3. Skip https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/a-50-year-quest-my-personal-journey-with-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/a-50-year-quest-... if you are tight on time. It helps tying things between 1 & 2. Given the context, the thesis gives sound foundations to the second law in terms of computation. It ties in remarkably well with Cellular Automata, and feels like "how did I not see this?". Here is my first attempt at summarising the whole thing (badly): The Second Law holds when systems are computationally irreducible for computationally bounded observers. The applicability changes based on the observers' computational capacities. Though it might seem like "it is obvious" to many, the restatement and interpretation of the second law is quite novel. The claim is that the second law is in fact a property of computational universe. Myself not being a physicist, I don't know how much and how well it ties with Physics Project. From a shallow perspective I am thinking "IF the universe is computational...". I have talked with some people who told me that without having established Physics Project as foundation, some interpretations of this thesis might be a bit stretched. But that is to be expected since the Physics Project is "his bet". In any case, it seems to me that the thesis presented in https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/computational-foundations-for-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/computational-fo... stands on its own for all of its core ideas.
- Kukumber 4y ago> At that point, things went crazy. There was talk of Nobel Prizes (I wasn’t buying it). There were official complaints from the French embassy about French scientists not being adequately recognized. There was upset at Thinking Machines for not even being mentioned. And, yes, as the originator of the idea, I was miffed that nobody seemed to have even suggested contacting me—even if I did view the rather breathless and “geopolitical” tenor of the article as being pretty far from immediate reality. > At the time, everyone involved denied having been responsible for the appearance of the article. But years later it emerged that the source was a certain John Gage, former political operative and longtime marketing operative at Sun Microsystems, who I’d known since 1982, and had at some point introduced to Brosl Hasslacher. Apparently he’d called around various government contacts to help encourage open (international) sharing of scientific code, quoting this as a test case. > But as it was, the article had pretty much exactly the opposite effect, with everyone now out for themselves. In Princeton, I’d interacted with Steve Orszag, whose funding for his new (traditional) computational fluid dynamics company, Nektonics, now seemed at risk, and who pulled me into an emergency effort to prove that cellular automaton fluid dynamics couldn’t be competitive. (The paper he wrote about this seemed interesting, but I demurred on being a coauthor.) Meanwhile, Thinking Machines wanted to file a patent as quickly as possible. Any possibility of the French government getting a Connection Machine evaporated and soon Brosl Hasslacher was claiming that “the French are faking their data”. Yet again, one mustn't go against the "american exceptionalism"[1] dogma, that's sad to hear The result of this ego-centric americanism; Russia able to develop their supersonic weapons before anyone in the west, thanks to the work of the silenced non-US scientists [2] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn8b3E9oUHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn8b3E9oUHY