What this project needs is someone at the center of it. A visionary. A leader. A genius. A prolix author. Can anyone think of someone???
Eric weinstein ?
Surely you mean Eric Weisstein
The Wolfram Physics Project
111–120 of 342 posts
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#112I think this has a better chance of succeeding than Hacker News having a Wolfram-related thread that isn't 50% slagging the guy.
Is it down to 50%? That's remarkable.
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#113I don't see anything of substance here, besides a lot of pretty graphs. Just like Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", we have the problem that there is a vast gulf between what you need to make flashy popsci and what you need to make a real physical theory. In increasing order of difficulty, you need to: 1. make a set of dynamical rules that matches general relativity in the low energy limit, such as recovering Lorent…
Is the following section a beginning of an attempt at that?
https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/potent...
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#114I don't see anything of substance here, besides a lot of pretty graphs. Just like Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", we have the problem that there is a vast gulf between what you need to make flashy popsci and what you need to make a real physical theory. In increasing order of difficulty, you need to: 1. make a set of dynamical rules that matches general relativity in the low energy limit, such as recovering Lorent…
The substance a good dsl for implementing rewrite/string substitution systems, as well as (likely high-quality) implementations of algorithms causal invariants, knuth-bendix completion, graph isomorphism, etc. [1]. A lot of that pre-existed the Wolfram Physics Project. The new thing appears to be:
1. a rebranding with improved documentation / learning resources for using those features (hey, documentation is hard! discoverability matters!), and
2. a set of really impressive rendering algorithms for visualizing these sorts of systems. (hey, visualizing mathematical objects is quite substantive! I'll happily pay good money for "low-effort pretty charts"!)
I addressed in the companion thread why I don't think this is particularly likely to result in "a new type of physics": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22866284
Mathematica is good software. Pre-wolframengine I did shell out the $2K for Mathematica because it contains best-in-class implementations of some important algorithms. A high-quality reimplementation that matches Mathematica's performance would take me several years (in an area where I have a phd). Wolfram Research employs smart folks and lets them spend their time writing really high quality code, and the only way to access that code is by calling Mathematica's built-in functions.
But just because the goal is perhaps a bit grandois and the presentation definitely breathless doesn't mean there's "nothing of substance".
[1] https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Tools/guide-...
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#115If someone wants to read something that is more like a classical physics paper there are these two papers by Jonathan Gorard: https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so... https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
Cheers!
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#116I don't see anything of substance here, besides a lot of pretty graphs. Just like Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", we have the problem that there is a vast gulf between what you need to make flashy popsci and what you need to make a real physical theory. In increasing order of difficulty, you need to: 1. make a set of dynamical rules that matches general relativity in the low energy limit, such as recovering Lorent…
The book doesn't seem to be out yet? Do you have access to an advance copy?
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#117I think this has a better chance of succeeding than Hacker News having a Wolfram-related thread that isn't 50% slagging the guy.
It's super sad. I don't know much about Physics at all. But I suspect any huge breakthrough will come when 1000s of people, like Wolfram, spend their life's effort to solve an incredibly hard problem. Almost all will fail, but some will succeed, and at the start it won't be obvious who is on the right path vs. who is a 'crank.'
Imagine just sitting at home, constantly talking shit and disparaging someone who has dedicated themselves to solving an almost intractably hard problem. And I say that as someone with no particular interest or liking of Wolfram.
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#118I think this has a better chance of succeeding than Hacker News having a Wolfram-related thread that isn't 50% slagging the guy.
I get downvoted whenever I make negative comments about cellular automata. It never fails. It’s the crowd.
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#119I don't see anything of substance here, besides a lot of pretty graphs. Just like Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", we have the problem that there is a vast gulf between what you need to make flashy popsci and what you need to make a real physical theory. In increasing order of difficulty, you need to: 1. make a set of dynamical rules that matches general relativity in the low energy limit, such as recovering Lorent…
Is the following section a beginning of an attempt at that? https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/potent...
Not really. It's very vague -- he is just repeatedly saying "well, you could write down X in terms of graphs in this way." But you can write down anything in terms of anything. You can write a compiler in PowerPoint because it's Turing complete. You can write the Bible in Klingon. You can write about making a burrito in category theory.
Languages are just packaging. In order to have content, you have to nail down specifics, and here the choice of language can be useful because the specifics might be more naturally expressed in some languages than others. But Wolfram hasn't begun this journey.
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
In university a professor was explaining how Wolfram formulated Physics in the 80s through finite automata instead of Mathematics, that must be the NKS. Is it actually (at least theoretically ;)) possible to calculate something with it, so that results match for instance Newtonian Physics?
It's "just" a different way of formulating mathematics, but sometimes formulating things differently can yield insights. At least attempting physics from this angle is a project with merit, especially since it seems as if conventional mathematical theoretical physics is a little stuck lately. The problem with the CA-based physics approaches are that while you can create CA models that work and are predictive in ways…
Admittedly, I only skimmed NKS. That said, I don't understand how the approach is different than anything else abusing the incidental fact that something is Turing complete to re-prove existing results.
The problem with these approaches, like trying to write a neural network in MS Excel, is that it's going to be cumbersome, slow, and provide little advantage over more straightforward calculation methods.