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An approach to the fundamental theory of physics
- shoggouth 2y agoThis is a good introduction to it by Stephen Wolfram himself[0]. [0]: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
- cloudking 2y agoDoes anyone understand this theory? When I read through it and listened to his talk, it sounded like a bunch of different ideas stitched together without an underlying explanation.
- sesm 2y agoIt's like string theory - a framework with tons of free parameters which will never produce a coherent physical theory, but you can always write a paper that contains a promise of explaining any observation with the right fine-tuning of some parameters (the promise will never be fulfilled, of course).
- Certhas 2y agoIt is utterly unlike string theory. String theory is a very rigid coherent theory. It has produced plenty of deep mathematical insights. I personally don't believe that it describes our universe, but it is possible to calculate its properties. Wolframs "Theory" is a bunch of relatively conventional ideas (by high energy physics theory standards), tied together by wishful thinking and speculation. In parts it seems almost possible to show that the ideas are actually contradictory. It is only saved by being to vague to fail coherence checks. It is, to use the old cliche, not even wrong.
- sesm 2y ago"Not even wrong" is a title of a book about String Theory by Peter Woit. I've noticed a common tactic in online disinformation campaigns: taking a common term associated with critique of some concept and spamming it in a different (sometimes opposite) context, to break the semantic link.
- Certhas 2y agoNot even wrong is a quip attributed to Wolfgang Pauli. This is where Woit got his blog and book title from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
- refulgentis 2y agoOof. Lol. If I ever start rambling about They's malfeasance in Their campaigns, may I receive as humble and direct a reply as this, as soon as possible.
- zachf 2y agoThere are exactly zero free parameters in string theory [0]. The details of why string phenomenology is hard is a difficult subject, but the characterization you've given of it is not correct. If you have a proof that string theory is not self-consistent, you should publish it, because there is no such proof in the scientific literature today. (Source: my PhD in physics.) Unfortunately, there is a ton of misinformation about this topic on the web. For example, people love to say that string theory predicts anything and everything. But it predicts (and rejects) a lot; it’s just that all of the known predictions happen to fall into the categories of (1) predicting things that are very hard for humans to measure (behavior of black holes at long time scales, graviton scattering, etc) or (2) retrodicting things we already know are true (e.g. gravity, Lorentz invariance, etc.). This state of things isn’t by design of nefarious string theorists designing their theory to be untestable, it’s just cruel fate of what comes out of the math. Hopefully someday we can find some other type of prediction, but string theory isn’t easy. [0] See e.g. https://indico.cern.ch/event/630393/contributions/2890113/attachments/1610680/2557430/Dawid.pdf https://indico.cern.ch/event/630393/contributions/2890113/at...
- pyinstallwoes 2y agoHow is string theory useful?
- zachf 2y agoTo whom? To other branches of physics? Look up AdS/CFT. To the general public? Dunno, I guess the pursuit of understanding the universe is its own reward for some.
- pyinstallwoes 2y agoHow is it understanding the universe if it’s not applicable/useful in the general case?
- zachf 2y agoYou mean, if string theory does not turn out to describe the universe, how could it be useful? Well, by giving extraordinarily powerful tools for understanding things that are well established to be useful, like quantum field theory. AdS/CFT gives us the only tool we have to analytically understand quantum field theories in the so-called “strong coupling regime”. This is useful for discovering new properties of quantum matter in systems where you would otherwise need simulations. You can think of it intuitively as string theory providing a glue between two descriptions of the quantum matter, like a “type cast” in programming where you start with one kind of object but reinterpret it as another. The thing that is incomprehensible in one representation is simple in the other. This was discovered by studying limits of string theory in interesting geometries.
- andrepd 2y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but it seems that it's a mathematical structure so open-ended that you can write most relevant mathematics in terms of it (as you can with e.g. set theory). And of course, if you can write math you can write physics.
- Viliam1234 2y agoYes. The problem is that you can write any physics in it, so you cannot use it to figure out anything about our universe. This is a crucial part that many intelligent people somehow utterly fail to understand. If you can explain everything (including the things that are not true), you can explain nothing. A theory that explains, is a theory that says "...therefore, X can happen, but Y can't happen". Like a mathematician who says that 2+2 is 4, but also says that 2+2 is not 5. Or a physicist who says "apples fall down from the tree, they don't fall up". Compare that to a "genius" mathematician or physicist who simply says "yes" to everything. Is 2+2=4? Yes. Is 2+2=5? Yes. Do apples fall down? Yes. Do apples fall up? Yes. And then people on internet are deeply impressed that he can answer everything. Such an amazing skill! Ask him about gravitons, he has a clear answer. Ask him about dark matter, he has a clear answer. Ask him about time travel, he also has a clear answer. The only problem is that he can both write a physics that contains gravitons, and a physics that does not contain gravitons. Etc. Ultimately, we want to know what is real about our universe. (Or multiverse, or whatever.) A model that says "yes" to both the things that are true and the things that are false, is useless. After you figure out what is true, you get "yeah, my model explains that". Problem is, the model explains the opposite just as well. ...then you take a step back, and remember that "can write anything" is simply a different way to say "Turing-complete". Yes, if you invent something that is Turing-complete, you can simulate a universe in it. Any universe. Both the ones that exist, and the ones that don't. (And the idea of Turing-completeness was discovered a few decades before Wolfram was born. So we can't even credit him with inventing the concept. He just uses the concept to impress people who either never heard about it, or never connected the dots.)
- FjordWarden 2y agoThe mathematical structure is called a hyper graph, a graph where nodes and edges come from the same set. Sounds weird at first but think about it like little sentences of the form subject predicate object. The word google can be all three places, as in: Google is a company, I googled his name or I work at Google. Here Google and its conjugations is an socio-economic object, but the set can also be the different grades within a geometric algebra where the different kind of reflections can be both operator and operand.
- drpossum 2y agoWhat makes it "good"?
- andrewflnr 2y agoWell, I can say I made more headway with this than with his book on the same topic that I saw at the library. In particular, this article seemed to justify the steps toward the "ruliad" a little better. Or maybe it's juuuust short enough that I didn't lose patience first.
- qnleigh 2y agoBefore people get too excited about this, note that Wolfram has been on about his own fundamental theory of everything for some time, and the wider physics community does not take it seriously. His book 'A New Kind of Science' has him taking credit for others' discoveries going back to Turing. Here are two recent critiques of this work: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-criticize-stephen-wolframs-theory-of-everything/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic... https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089
- Certhas 2y agoI particularly enjoy this classic review. Very informative: http://www.bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/
- jpmattia 2y agoI think the acknowledgements in your second link are interesting: > I thank Stephen Wolfram for an enjoyable conversation about this review;
- elashri 2y agoAway from the fact that this is not taken seriously by the physics community. This is the first time we have a chance to use crypto to support a fundamental physics research \s [1] [1] https://www.wolframphysics.org/membership/ https://www.wolframphysics.org/membership/
- sva_ 2y ago> For Kids: Junior Phyzzie > One-time $100 donation This actually had me laugh out loud. I must've been a poor kid
- stouset 2y agoAs if ransomware, money laundering, pump and dump schemes, and tax evasion weren’t enough, now cryptocurrency can be used to support pseudoscience! Will the wonders never cease? Sorry, I know this is a bit snark-heavy for HN but I can’t help but feel impressed by the way cryptocurrency has somehow succeeded in associating itself with so many ills of modern society.
- K0balt 2y agoFor all the various ills it is sometimes associated with, cryptocurrency remains the only frictionless, 100% transparent, publicly accessible international monetary and payment system. That seems like something we would want, the ability to freely transfer payment from one individual to another, internationally, contractually, and transparently. The only interests that I would think would want that gone are those that profit from the many choke points in our financial systems. Sure, speculators and opportunists have leveraged benefits, and they are the ones you always hear about… you don’t hear about the millions of people quietly managing their private and legal financial affairs, because when you use it for that, it just works -exactly as designed. FWIW I think you can much more easily associate cash with all kinds of shady and socially caustic uses, but for whatever reason not very many cryptocurrency critics are out to abolish cash, which I would think would be the poster child for seedy, shady, toxic commerce. But, sure, crypto bad and whatever.
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- dang 2y agoAll: please let's not repeat the usual comments about Wolfram himself. They were a cliché on HN already a decade ago*, and many years before that on the web at large. It's a good test for the community whether we can focus on what's new/different/interesting here and resist the temptation to noise. * (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20wolfram%20-alpha&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
- Certhas 2y ago[flagged]
- rdtsc 2y agoAre there any well respect physicists or research groups independent of Wolfram's group who are taking this seriously or collaborating with Wolfram Physics project? I would expect something like "an here is Max Planck Institute for Physics collaborating with Wolfram Physics research project on ...". Or something of that nature. At least after all these years.
- Certhas 2y agoI used to work close to people who were actually somewhat close to the stuff contained in the papers. The consensus was that there is nothing of substance to engage with. Edit: When the technical papers appeared in 2020, I personally went through them in some detail. Tl;dr there are almost no novel ideas of substance in there. Specifically I looked at the "launch documents" provided here: https://wolframphysics.org/technical-documents/ https://wolframphysics.org/technical-documents/ which, to my knowledge, still are the closest we have to a coherent description of what the grand vision is. Unfortunately I didn't keep my detailed notes, but looking specifically at the relativistic paper, it might appear substantial, but that is because large parts of it review well-known basic results in discrete geometry and causal sets. The actual content is described in a hand wavy way, with little in calculations or rigor (and some elementary mistakes, too). The issue is that everything that goes beyond standard results is essentially wishful thinking or circular. "If my update rules are such that they produce a causal structure that corresponds to that of a 4-dimensional spacetime, then the wolfram model produces a 4-dimensional spacetime!". This would be interesting if there was any way to characterize the update rules that do so. However, there is not. There is simply the implication that since update rules are very general it must surely be possible to find one that does. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the reader. A prime example is in Section 3.3: In all that follows, we shall assume one further condition on the hypergraph update rules, beyond mere causal invariance: namely, “asymptotic dimensionality preservation”. Loosely speaking, this means that the dimensionality of the causal graph show converge to some fixed, finite value as the number of updating events grows arbitrarily large. However, abstractly defining ensembles of causal graphs that actually produce (at least with high likelihood) the causal graphs of low dimensional manifolds is exactly the core of the issue. If you are able to do that, then the standard results of causal set theory get you the rest of the way. This central difficulty is simply "assumed" to be solved. No further discussion is given on what type of update rules would actually be dimensionality preserving, nor is this identified as a key research question, nor is any evidence or heuristic provided that WOlframs approach has anything new to say on this problem. As far as I recall the quantum mechanics paper was even worse.
- fredgrott 2y agoa better read is the discourse between D Hofstadler and Penrose as it addresses both sides of the argument with actual working theories... And, yes it takes a while to digest...you have to invest some time in reading both authors series on the subject...but its well worth the read.
- limit499karma 2y agoIs this an actual dialogue [link please?] or do you mean the duel between G.E.B. & Emperor's New Mind?
- dakiol 2y agoDespite all the negativity towards Wolfram, he’s one of the few out there whom I’m jealous about. He gets to work on his own products, gets time to develop his own theories about important stuff and using his own tools. That’s basically my dream. Who cares if at the end, his findings have “no substance”, he’s living the (nerd) dream.
- ProAm 2y agoThis is actually the first Ive heard about any negativity. Are there a couple articles about whats not to like? To be far, I only know about his website and some tool, and that he's intelligent and good at math (which is likely not enough knowledge about that guy), but I always assumed his work was geared towards serious researchers and not really meant for someone like me (little math and physics). I'm not trying to stir the pot or create infighting on HN, just Ive never heard a bad thing about him until I see the comments here.
- ahazred8ta 2y agoHe was a child prodigy and published world-class work on quarks, QM, and subatomic particles while he was still a teenager. More recently he has been more interested in an imaginary world that only exists in his imagination and on paper. He's made a lot of discoveries there and insists that the analogy between his discoveries and the real world is major big brain stuff. He's still very productive in math and computer science, but not in physics.
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- leephillips 2y agoIn over 20 years since the publication of A New Kind of Science, Wolfram’s approach had not led to a single prediction, neither verified nor falsified, about the natural world. I would very much like to be corrected about this if I’m wrong. Physicists show that their ideas have substance by solving problems. But Wolfram’s ideas don’t tell us the masses of the elementary particles, the drag of the flow of water through a pipe, or anything else. This is why the scientific community doesn’t care about this stuff.
- mathinaly 2y agoThe paradigm he's using is too open ended. In quantum mechanics the mathematics is based on Hilbert spaces and unitary evolutions of state vectors. You might ask why this is the case and it is because of conservation principles. Unitary evolution preserves "information" in the state vector throughout its physical evolution. This is not the case for Wolfram's theories. There are no conservation principles in cellular automata other than explicitly forcing the evolution of the automaton to actually preserve the relevant information. More generally, most computational theories of physics are much too lax about the relevant conservation principles and that is why his theory does not predict anything. Turing machines specifically are not required to preserve anything about the initial state and so information can be destroyed and created ex nihilo, violating the main principle of physics which requires that all matter and energy be conserved. The equations have to balance out at the beginning and the end, whatever you start with can not be greater or less than what you end with (at least in physics).
- VirusNewbie 2y ago>. Turing machines specifically are not required to preserve anything about the initial state and so information can be destroyed and created ex nihilo, violating the main principle of physics which requires that all matter and energy be conserved. The equations have to balance out at the beginning and the end, whatever you start with can not be greater or less than what you end with (at least in physics). can you explain this more rigorously? I don't see how computation 'destorys' information, unless you are using "destroy" loosely and you just mean exploding the state space?
- meindnoch 2y agoOh, this is still a thing? Last time I checked, their claim was that the universe can be modelled as a sufficiently large hypergraph rewriting system, with some initial state, and some set of rules. Which initial state? Which set of rules? Well, uh... some! It's like saying that the Universe can be modelled as a Turing machine, with sufficiently large memory. (or a bunch of pebbles: https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/) Are there any new claims from them?
- mo_42 2y agoAs a computer scientist who got in touch with quite some theoretical computer science, I find Wolfram's approach appealing. I suppose this approach resonates quite well in CS departments as our minds already know about things like fractals, cellular automata, hypergraphs, etc. What's not so present in CS (at least where I studied) is philosophy of science. Falsifiability and how theories are created and tested is less grounded in my mind than the topics already mentioned. Though, in physics, this is really important. Last time I checked, his approach was not able to make real predictions about our world. So it's not yet a real theory. Of course, this doesn't mean people should stop working on this. It also took humans a long time to develop the mathematics to describe gravity correctly.
- dave333 2y agoFar more interesting, novel, and deserving of more attention is Mills classical model of the atom as electrons in spinning fluid shell orbitspheres. Lots of predictions first made in the 1990s like accelerating expansion of the universe, dark matter, and energy from hydrogen that is 200 times the energy of burning it. https://brilliantlightpower.com/wp-content/uploads/theory/TheoryPresentationPt1-web-032017.pdf https://brilliantlightpower.com/wp-content/uploads/theory/Th... https://brilliantlightpower.com/subject-exciting-news-the-grand-unified-theory-of-classical-physics-is-now-available-on-amazon-and-more/ https://brilliantlightpower.com/subject-exciting-news-the-gr...