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The Wolfram Physics Project

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#131

Post by notfromhere »

GuiA wrote: post #83
ur-whale wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, let's force one of the most creative dude of this century back into the rigid pen others are allowed to play in, just in case he does something crazy and interesting. What a lame idea, truly worthy of a mandarin.

The guy pretty much single handedly built a profitable company that enables him to pursue whatever research interests he want, and that’s been going for over 30 years. They hate him cause they ain’t him.

there were a ton of lawsuits and there’s a reason why the local university doesn’t associate with him despite his previous tenure and employment.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#132

Post by crispyambulance »

undefined1 wrote: post #80
mellosouls wrote: post #62

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?

N'ah. It's good that folks like Wolfram and Eric Weinstein are taking a different path. Sometimes that's what it takes for new breakthroughs to emerge. If nothing else it could spark new ideas or invigorate others to take bolder approaches and move outside their comfort zone.

What breakthrough for Eric Weinstein? So far he's just been doing this grandiose marketing push where talks in dense comically impenetrable jargon TO LAYMEN (eg the Joe Rogan show) and releases bizarre rambling videos on youtube that attempt to tie together politics, history, his beef with academia and his "theory of everything".

It smells like bullshit but people seem to gobble it up and call him a genius, for what? He hasn't published, there's no complete explanation it's just endless front-matter for never-completely explained "geometric unity." If you've ever heard of the internet scammer Ty Lopez... that's what this guy sounds like but for physics instead of self-help.

At least Wolfram has something to show.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#133

Post by diegoperini »

lliamander wrote: post #106
saadalem wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eric weinstein ?

I'd like to see that. Although honestly I find him and his brother to both be frustratingly vague and abstract at times.

Bret helps much more to his listeners than his brother imo.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#134

Post by natalyarostova »

knzhou wrote: post #129
natalyarostova wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dedi…

Well, here I am talking shit about Wolfram, but I'm a physicist. There are thousands of us spending our lives on incredibly hard problems. The only difference between Wolfram and Weinstein and the rest of us is that they're declaring victory in an incredibly premature, flashy way. When the rest of us have an idea, we try hard to prove it wrong (which is fundamental to how science works), not search for a lay audience…

Fair enough. I'm not a physicist, so I'll defer to you on this. Do you think Wolfram's strange style is worth trying, as a moon-shot? (Ignoring for a second his personality).

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#136

Post by vntok »

tinman25 wrote: post #89

So basically this: https://xkcd.com/505/ huh Stephen? -Question has anyone validated and/or disproved his Geometric Rules based approach and NKS Cellular automata against traditional physics models and found predictable conclusions that can be tested via experiment? IE is it really anything other alternative notation/representation system? It essentially presupposes a computational canvas to the universe,but in what…

I haven't seen the ideas he presents over there exposed anywhere else in either science publications, global media or even hobbyist blogs. Maybe there's a lesson there that some smart minds might do better when absolving themselves of the constraints of traditional science processes and publishing rythm?

Now this guy is in a very interesting position, as someone who became fixated upon an interesting (?) phenomenon at one point in his life, then spent decades studying it, wrote books and papers about it, designed a fundamental theory basically ex nihilo based on his grand idea about that field (I'm not arguing for/against the theory's veracity here), AND then built a whole toolset around it all to do research, AND wrote books about his research, AND recorded hours of videos, AND now apparently is putting it all online for people to get easy access for free.

He's thought about something, he's worked it and now he's sharing it all. So I'm kind of curious, what more do you want him to do at this point?

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#137

Post by DantesKite »

gfodor wrote: post #50
DantesKite wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way. His book A New Kind of Science (the first chapters) have been revolutionary. I think his work will lay down the foundations of science for centuries to come. It is curious though. Nearly every criticism I’ve read hasn’t grappled with his ideas—just the man, out of insecurity and ego. And he’s a lovely writer. I don’t sense ego from him. Just honesty about the work he’s done and contributed. You r…

One potential archetype for him that is consistent is he simply cannot recognize these political concerns. Many of us feel anxiety about the idea we may be interpreted as stepping on peoples' work, or failing to recognize their efforts and how they may have led to our own advancement. It may be that Wolfram, for whatever reason, simply doesn't have that - not out of malice, but just as a core deficiency in his abilit…

I think the reaction of people to Stephen Wolfram talking about the brilliance of his work in a very mild-mannered way says more about them than it does about him.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#138

Post by dang »

I'm going to try to merge the other thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867707) hither. Please stand by. Edit: that's done. I adopted the other title, in the hope that it will have less of a flamebait effect.

All: no more Wolfram Derangement Syndrome comments, please. They're off topic because they're always the same, and they compose into a weird counterversion of the very thing they're deriding.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#139

Post by lukifer »

lliamander wrote: post #106
saadalem wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eric weinstein ?

I'd like to see that. Although honestly I find him and his brother to both be frustratingly vague and abstract at times.

At times, Eric has quite the way with words; yet on Lex Fridman's podcast, he really struggled to communicate Geometric Unity in a way that's even slightly accessible to a layperson, despite Lex's patient prodding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIAZJNe7YtE

I actually find his brother Bret to be the opposite in his manner, far more measured and comprehensible: though he'll occasionally forget that you might not know a particular term of art (telomeres, extended phenotype), his ideas are more narrowly scoped to genetic selection pressures and game theory, and a little easier to parse. (His experience is primarily as an educator, which Eric's is not.) Bret and his wife have been doing an educational series on COVID-19, which is quite accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-W9O7qhstY&list=PLjQ2gC-5yH...

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#140

Post by hobofan »

outlace wrote: post #124
hobofan wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He claimed that "all our laboratory mice are broken". Video links and discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/g0ioxq/if_it_is_...

He's speaking on behalf of his brother Brett Weinstein, who is qualified to say such things.

There are still so many things wrong in how he tells the story that it doesn't pass a basic smell test for me.

- He omits that this study was from 2000, so quite some time ago. Given that the paper about that has 200+ citations, I would say that it got the eyeballs it deserved. He doesn't offer any recent evidence that indicate that this is still the case today.

- The core claim he makes "all mice are broken" is a hyperbole that a lot of people will tell you is unsubstantiated. He makes it sound like all tests done on mice are flawed because of it.

- "I called them up and they were not able to produce any records that they changed their breeding protocols" doesn't mean that they didn't change them in the 20 years that passed. It just means that they didn't produce them to some random person contacting them.

I'm not as "surprised nobody is breaking this story" as he is.

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