5 ms·
No. Even though Mathematica is arguably meaningful. It's very popular with some scientists, and in many aspects it's a respectable piece of software. A few yea
by mr_mitm 2y ago
No. Even though Mathematica is arguably meaningful. It's very popular with some scientists, and in many aspects it's a respectable piece of software.
A few years ago Sean Carroll was hosting him on his podcast. It was a bit surprising to me because Sean would never give a crackpot the time of the day, and Wolfram is borderline in crackpot territory IMHO, but not quite. He hasn't published anything meaningful in a scientific journal in a long time as far as I know.
- ericbarrett 2y agoI am neither a mathematician nor a scientist, so I’m unqualified to judge Wolfram’s current theories* of physics and computation. But my impression is that he remains quite rigorous in his work, even if the path he’s walking is far from the main. And of course he’s quite bombastic, which always seems to raise hackles. In fact, the article on which this discussion anchors is a great example of both. * Ref: https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/ https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/ The podcast with Sean Carroll that parent mentioned is also a surprisingly accessible lay introduction, definitely worth a listen.
- empath75 2y agoAs far as I can tell, he's not a crackpot, and doesn't say anything that isn't _true_, he just wastes a lot of time going down dead ends, and relentlessly promotes himself. Like all the stuff about Rule 30 that he writes _endlessly_ about is both true and about 1/100th as interesting as he evidently thinks it is.
- jnwatson 2y agoWhen I started reading the article, I wondered to myself, how long before he talks about cellular automata? He almost made it to the end but I guess he just can't help it.