5 ms·

Wolfram On Hunting For Our Universe

25 points by Neoryder 19y ago

amichail 19y ago
You might find this review of Wolfram's book interesting: http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf
- Neoryder 19y ago
  nice, Thanks!
- jsjenkins168 19y ago
  When the book first came out, I remember there was an air of skepticism surrounding some of its concepts. Has the view towards the book by the science community changed much in the years since? I'm not a physicist, but have always been interested in Wolfram's work out of curiosity from a comp sci perspective.
  - programnature 19y ago
    Some ideas have already become commonplace, others less so. Simple programs as 'language primitive' for modeling was criticised by many, but is now becoming popular, particularly in biology (see for example http://fontana.med.harvard.edu/www/Documents/WF/Papers/signaling.causality.pdf http://fontana.med.harvard.edu/www/Documents/WF/Papers/signa...) General ideas like computational irreduciblity and instrinsic randomness are finding increasingly direct evidence in the physical world (http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/fruit-flies-have-free-will-13230.html http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/fruit-flies-have-free-will-13...) In terms of exploring the raw computational universe, lots of people in architecture and generative design are doing related things now. Unforunately most people are unaware of the fundamental ideas that underly all of these threads.
jey 19y ago
Why should it be this network thing? He doesn't back up his assertion that the universe is described by one of these networks. Juergen Schmidhuber lays out an interesting idea that our Universe is just one Turing machine, generated by an enumeration of all Turing machines (generating all possible Universes). http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/everything/html.html http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/everything/html.html
- programnature 19y ago
  The difference is that Wolfram wants an actual, single correct model in his hands, whereas Juergen is just talking about hypothetical computations that theoretically produce our universe as well as all the rest (with no hope of being discovered by us humans) Effectively Wolfram is pruning the search space by looking for the simplest rules that he thinks have a shot of reproducing known physical features of the universe (eg special and general relativity, with a plan for how QM may come about), and then looking within that space for the specific flavor that is our universe. If you actually want to find the model via searching programs, this is the only realistic way to do it.
- Alex3917 19y ago
  "But I suspect it's really more integrated: that everything is "just space", with the particles being something like special little lumps of connectivity in the network corresponding to space." He's not saying it's definitely a network, he's just saying that he's going to start looking there because it intuitively makes sense. This seems reasonable for a few reasons. First, networks are the most advanced form of organization we currently know of. Second, it potentially provides a very simple explanation for many things, such as gravity. Third, the idea that matter is just really concentrated nothingness is just too cool not to look at. And it sort of makes sense if you believe in zero-point energy, which supposedly both general relativity and quantum mechanics predict (according to the free energy nuts). /not a theoretical physicist
- eru 19y ago
  "Conclusion. By stepping back and adopting the Great Programmer's point of view, classic problems of philosophy go away."
kcl 19y ago
How can this guy STILL be that full of himself even after all the shit he took for writing A New Kind of Science?
- amichail 19y ago
  The book has quite a few citations: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=3139230665686742056 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=31...
  - kcl 19y ago
    It also had a quite a large marketing campaign behind it. Last I checked most objective scientific writing didn't come with a hype machine attached.
    - pg 19y ago
      Citations seem a far more reliable positive indicator of quality than hype is a negative one.
      - ivankirigin 19y ago
        People citing work would indicate that work's quality, but the complaint about "A New Kind Of Science" was weak citations, an indication of poor quality. I don't know much about the details. Nor do I know how much people have sited Wolfram's work since. I think what upsets a lot of people is the attitude. But a bad attitude can still accompany good work, so I excuse Wolfram for his quirks. That acceptance is essential when dealing with people who know they are much smarter than the average person. While at NYU, I saw Wolfram speak while on his big book tour. There were a few big brains at the Courant Institute that leveled major criticisms at the book. Unfortunately, there was another talk about nonlinear PDEs that most of the critics elected to attend in place of watching Wolfram. Wolfram started the talk by saying, "well, the important people aren't here to see this, but I suppose I'll continue anyway". As one of the hoi polloi, I found the remark amazingly conceited, probably correct, and a bit charming at the same time.
DanielBMarkham 19y ago
I read NKS. Good book! Especially for math, physics, and programming geeks. There has been a lot of speculation that the universe is a simulation. If Wolfram manages to ascertain the rules and network that "runs" the universe, then the question becomes whether a universe is a simulation, or just acts like one. Is there a difference between something that has only computational rules and structure and a computer program?
henning 19y ago
Wow, he's turning into a crackpot: long, rambling articles with no introduction or conclusions that have no math or results to speak of, furtive mentions of how the rest of the physics community can't grasp how brilliant and far-out his remarkable work is (which could be because he doesn't publish, doesn't collaborate, doesn't go to conferences, and basically doesn't actually participate in the research community).
- puppetsock 19y ago
  John Baez has developed an index for quantitatively judging revolutionary discoveries in physics: http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html Doesn't look like Wolfram scores very high on Baez's index, although Wolfram does get the 50 point item.
  - Kaizyn 19y ago
    He gets the 30 point question #30 too.
yters 19y ago
So if our universe is essentially computational, what are the implications of Godel's incompleteness theorem? Doesn't this mean there must be an infinite number of axioms our universe is generated from?
- forgotmylastone 19y ago
  Maybe, but maybe it just means our universe is full of real contradictions.
  - yters 19y ago
    Science makes progress by assuming there are not real contradictions.
- earthboundkid 19y ago
  If Wolfram is right, our universe would be a mathematical "function" not a mathematical "system". Godel showed that every system of sufficient complexity has facts about it that can't be proven. There is no reason to think though that every function within a complex goes back on itself. x = y, for example, doesn't loop around no matter how far out you go. For my part however I don't believe it's possible for the universe to be "pure math" (that is, its reality comes from an equation and nothing else besides it) in the sense that we understand "math". Nevertheless, it might be that there is an equation that can predict everything we experience. We may as well search for it.
  - DanielBMarkham 19y ago
    Wolfram's a lot smarter than I am, but I believe he also believes the function is discrete and not continuous. In fact, he makes the point in NKS that we may have went off the rails with Newton and the calculus. It may turn out that the universe is discrete and that our understanding of it as continuous is just an artifact of not having the computational power to see how discrete functions can effectively look continuous at a much larger scale (sort of a reverse proof of the integral) It blows my mind. But if you're a genius, might as well have a hobby, right? I'm just glad he took this up instead of bowling. Just thought I would add that clarification in there, because I know the word "function" has a lot of meanings to people.
daniel-cussen 19y ago
My brain just got stretch marks.
inklesspen 19y ago
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ provides an interesting read on Wolfram and his "New" "Science".

25 points by Neoryder 19y ago

You might find this review of Wolfram's book interesting: http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf

Neoryder 19y ago
nice, Thanks!
jsjenkins168 19y ago
When the book first came out, I remember there was an air of skepticism surrounding some of its concepts. Has the view towards the book by the science community changed much in the years since? I'm not a physicist, but have always been interested in Wolfram's work out of curiosity from a comp sci perspective.
- programnature 19y ago
  Some ideas have already become commonplace, others less so. Simple programs as 'language primitive' for modeling was criticised by many, but is now becoming popular, particularly in biology (see for example http://fontana.med.harvard.edu/www/Documents/WF/Papers/signaling.causality.pdf http://fontana.med.harvard.edu/www/Documents/WF/Papers/signa...) General ideas like computational irreduciblity and instrinsic randomness are finding increasingly direct evidence in the physical world (http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/fruit-flies-have-free-will-13230.html http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/fruit-flies-have-free-will-13...) In terms of exploring the raw computational universe, lots of people in architecture and generative design are doing related things now. Unforunately most people are unaware of the fundamental ideas that underly all of these threads.

jey 19y ago

Why should it be this network thing? He doesn't back up his assertion that the universe is described by one of these networks. Juergen Schmidhuber lays out an interesting idea that our Universe is just one Turing machine, generated by an enumeration of all Turing machines (generating all possible Universes). http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/everything/html.html http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/everything/html.html

programnature 19y ago
The difference is that Wolfram wants an actual, single correct model in his hands, whereas Juergen is just talking about hypothetical computations that theoretically produce our universe as well as all the rest (with no hope of being discovered by us humans) Effectively Wolfram is pruning the search space by looking for the simplest rules that he thinks have a shot of reproducing known physical features of the universe (eg special and general relativity, with a plan for how QM may come about), and then looking within that space for the specific flavor that is our universe. If you actually want to find the model via searching programs, this is the only realistic way to do it.
Alex3917 19y ago
"But I suspect it's really more integrated: that everything is "just space", with the particles being something like special little lumps of connectivity in the network corresponding to space." He's not saying it's definitely a network, he's just saying that he's going to start looking there because it intuitively makes sense. This seems reasonable for a few reasons. First, networks are the most advanced form of organization we currently know of. Second, it potentially provides a very simple explanation for many things, such as gravity. Third, the idea that matter is just really concentrated nothingness is just too cool not to look at. And it sort of makes sense if you believe in zero-point energy, which supposedly both general relativity and quantum mechanics predict (according to the free energy nuts). /not a theoretical physicist
eru 19y ago
"Conclusion. By stepping back and adopting the Great Programmer's point of view, classic problems of philosophy go away."

kcl 19y ago

How can this guy STILL be that full of himself even after all the shit he took for writing A New Kind of Science?

amichail 19y ago
The book has quite a few citations: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=3139230665686742056 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=31...
- kcl 19y ago
  It also had a quite a large marketing campaign behind it. Last I checked most objective scientific writing didn't come with a hype machine attached.
  - pg 19y ago
    Citations seem a far more reliable positive indicator of quality than hype is a negative one.
    - ivankirigin 19y ago
      People citing work would indicate that work's quality, but the complaint about "A New Kind Of Science" was weak citations, an indication of poor quality. I don't know much about the details. Nor do I know how much people have sited Wolfram's work since. I think what upsets a lot of people is the attitude. But a bad attitude can still accompany good work, so I excuse Wolfram for his quirks. That acceptance is essential when dealing with people who know they are much smarter than the average person. While at NYU, I saw Wolfram speak while on his big book tour. There were a few big brains at the Courant Institute that leveled major criticisms at the book. Unfortunately, there was another talk about nonlinear PDEs that most of the critics elected to attend in place of watching Wolfram. Wolfram started the talk by saying, "well, the important people aren't here to see this, but I suppose I'll continue anyway". As one of the hoi polloi, I found the remark amazingly conceited, probably correct, and a bit charming at the same time.

DanielBMarkham 19y ago

I read NKS. Good book! Especially for math, physics, and programming geeks. There has been a lot of speculation that the universe is a simulation. If Wolfram manages to ascertain the rules and network that "runs" the universe, then the question becomes whether a universe is a simulation, or just acts like one. Is there a difference between something that has only computational rules and structure and a computer program?

henning 19y ago

Wow, he's turning into a crackpot: long, rambling articles with no introduction or conclusions that have no math or results to speak of, furtive mentions of how the rest of the physics community can't grasp how brilliant and far-out his remarkable work is (which could be because he doesn't publish, doesn't collaborate, doesn't go to conferences, and basically doesn't actually participate in the research community).

puppetsock 19y ago
John Baez has developed an index for quantitatively judging revolutionary discoveries in physics: http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html Doesn't look like Wolfram scores very high on Baez's index, although Wolfram does get the 50 point item.
- Kaizyn 19y ago
  He gets the 30 point question #30 too.

yters 19y ago

So if our universe is essentially computational, what are the implications of Godel's incompleteness theorem? Doesn't this mean there must be an infinite number of axioms our universe is generated from?

forgotmylastone 19y ago
Maybe, but maybe it just means our universe is full of real contradictions.
- yters 19y ago
  Science makes progress by assuming there are not real contradictions.
earthboundkid 19y ago
If Wolfram is right, our universe would be a mathematical "function" not a mathematical "system". Godel showed that every system of sufficient complexity has facts about it that can't be proven. There is no reason to think though that every function within a complex goes back on itself. x = y, for example, doesn't loop around no matter how far out you go. For my part however I don't believe it's possible for the universe to be "pure math" (that is, its reality comes from an equation and nothing else besides it) in the sense that we understand "math". Nevertheless, it might be that there is an equation that can predict everything we experience. We may as well search for it.
- DanielBMarkham 19y ago
  Wolfram's a lot smarter than I am, but I believe he also believes the function is discrete and not continuous. In fact, he makes the point in NKS that we may have went off the rails with Newton and the calculus. It may turn out that the universe is discrete and that our understanding of it as continuous is just an artifact of not having the computational power to see how discrete functions can effectively look continuous at a much larger scale (sort of a reverse proof of the integral) It blows my mind. But if you're a genius, might as well have a hobby, right? I'm just glad he took this up instead of bowling. Just thought I would add that clarification in there, because I know the word "function" has a lot of meanings to people.

daniel-cussen 19y ago

My brain just got stretch marks.

inklesspen 19y ago

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ provides an interesting read on Wolfram and his "New" "Science".