I can't tell if this is real or the output of a neural network trained on Mr Wolfram's corpus of bloviation.
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The Wolfram Physics Project
141–150 of 342 posts
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Physics research being the way it is, everything is worth trying if somebody really believes in it, because everything is a moonshot. I'm personally working on one right now, so I'm too busy to work on Wolfram's, but more power to him if he wants to continue!
My personal intuition is that a new language is only useful if it has enough "meat" to constrain things. For example, most physicists know almost nothing about logic, because it seems so far upstream of everything else that changes in it have no effect. (Indeed, logic has changed a lot in the past 100 years, and nothing happened to us!) But almost everybody in physics agrees that the language of differential forms is awesome, because with some minimal assumptions, they say that there's essentially one way to write down the theory of electromagnetism -- and it turns out to be the right way. Similarly, it looks like there's little promise in applying computability theory to physics, because it is grounded in what happens "at infinity" (and hence does not lend itself to predicting anything in our inherently finite experiments), but real promise in applying information theory and computational complexity theory, which can tell us about asymptotics. So that was why my first reaction is that Wolfram's exceedingly general language wouldn't be very helpful.
However, attitudes can and have changed. If Wolfram and co. come up with a sharp success, where they derive something important without directly putting what they want to get into their starting assumptions, people would pay attention. That's precisely why, e.g. special and general relativity, quantum field theory and string theory are so important today. They all started this way.
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There is an argument, and I think Wolfram has made it, that one would expect the systems and the math to become simpler the deeper and more fundamental the models became, and the opposite seems to be true with modern physics. When you say conventional math, you’re referring to math that would be quite difficult let’s say for even a dedicated undergraduate math, physics or electrical engineering major. The CA, on the…
But it's only easier to comprehend because it's vaguer. If you wanted to express specific, nontrivial mathematical statements in CA language, it would immediately get more complicated. Certainly, a paragraph about Euclid's Elements would be easier to comprehend than a paragraph from the Elements, but that's not a fair comparison...
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> theoretical physics is dead I'm genuinely not sure why you believe this especially as we live in an era when theoretical physics and experimental physics are becoming so entwined and the product is a fairly successful testing of our models of physics.
It's not dead in the sense that we've done a better job of experimentally confirming things like general relativity and aspects of quantum mechanics, due to being able to accurately perform more precise observations (like with LHC and LIGO). I'd say this is a triumph of advances in experimental physics, though, rather than theoretical physics. There doesn't seem to have been any widely accepted fundamental theoretica…
This is pure speculation on my part so take it for a grain of salt. But I generally don't find that fields just stop advancing or go cold. It seems to me that usually what is happening is there is a lot of work going on at a level that does not make a lot of sense to report to a lay audience or at leas the media which covers the subject does not think a lay audience could understand or would be interested in it.
Co Sider biology. What is the last major biology idea that made a huge public splsh? DNA? The human genome sequence? But are biologists stuck the world round? Of course not there have been hundreds if not thousands of notable biology findings in the past 20 years.
Theoretical physics probably simply appears stuck to us because as lay people we focus on a couple of large scale questions that for now are probably out of reach. But we don't consider the hundreds of theoretical physics refinements and observations that need to go into the development of the LHC or LIGO or James Webb etc.
Anyway, that's just like my opinion man.
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So did a lot of other people who aren’t extreme narcissists. I think it’s reasonable to find someone’s work admirable and yet think they have terrible personalities. There is a line of thought were people should be judged by what they create rather than how they behave, but luckily not many subscribe to it. Not even grown-up Linus Torvalds subscribes to it.
Has there been any issues of Wolfram assaulting/harassing/abusing/etc other people? Or are people just upset about the pompous style of his writing? Those are different kinds of “behavior”.
Because while we should totally condemn the former, it seems that we’re discussing the latter here, and it’s hard to get riled up about.
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#146Incorrect predictions are all the rage nowadays, so here is mine: they will find an infinite amount of rule sets that could be the fundamental theory. However, none of it would be testable, so people would pick their own based on their notion of simplicity and beauty. Eventually people would start looking into common properties of the candidate solutions and transformations between them.
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 haven't been deeply plugged into Wolfram's breakthroughs since "A New Kind Of Science," but if memory serves I don't think he's discovered anything that offers insight in the physics world in the utility sense. By which I mean: progress in physics usually looks like finding a novel relationship between previously-thought-separate phenomena, an improvement on the mechanics of using an existing theory for predictive…
I’ll let the next few hundred years judge how relevant or not his contribution to physics was. I don’t think anyone writing in 2020 has much sense of that.
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#148I 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…
(1) We certainly do have formal derivations of Lorentz covariance and the Einstein field equations, given in detail here: http://wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some-re... (2) The article above already discusses the derivation of the matter contribution to the Lagrangian density, the derivation of energy-momentum tensor, and Lorentz transformations for elementary particles. (3) Both Hawking radiation an…
Are you guys planning on submitting your novel findings to peer reviewed physics journals? Have you done that? How has that gone?
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#149> A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics Physics noob here, but I do a lot of theory / model development in other areas, at work and in my batcave. So I'm wondering: What if there are multiple fundamental theories, just like there are millions of different ways of looking at things, all with their various leverage/application points? > we’re going to have to find the specific rule for our universe I just…
I think this might relate to what he discusses at the end of the very long Project Announcement blog/article. Something like there may be many different rules, but the one we find will be correct for us due to the framework we have for evaluating the universe (senses, math, etc.).
Re: The Wolfram Physics Project
#150If 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...
Are these going to be submitted for appropriate peer review?