Could somebody explain to Stephen Wolfram physics is already underway and the normal way to join in is to publish your ideas in appropriate venues and submit them to peer review?
Well, his reasoning is sound enough - if his results are truly spectacular, it probably won’t matter that they weren’t published in peer reviewed venues. At the same time, turning boring results into something fit for publishing can be very time consuming - more than the research itself, and at the opportunity cost of attacking juicier problems. So if your goal is to utterly revolutionize a field, and you are very co…
I don't think Wolfram's work in the physics space on the cellular automata model has met any of these criteria, so it's not surprising he's not getting mainstrean publication traction. His CA model isn't bringing us novel relationships (yet; I hold out hope here), it isn't making it easier to do what we already do, it hasn't yielded any predictions that existing theories don't also yield, and it's certainly not simpler than field theory and relationship formulae that don't assume a CA. Until there's a breakthrough in one of those three categories that can't be done easily with one of the traditional mechanisms, Wolfram's doing the scientific equivalent of translating lingua franca physics into Klingon; not really wasted effort in that it can be valuable to see something from more than one point of view, but not something that anyone's gonna pay him for or devote their precious column-inches to.