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The Wolfram Physics Project

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#151

Post by Reedx »

crispyambulance wrote: post #132
undefined1 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

Eric says his theory is a work in progress, may be wrong and may even be fool's gold (his words). That's a ways off from claiming breakthrough. And I don't see him selling magic pills or some get rich quick scheme.

It seems to me he's just exploring ideas in the open. That's great. I don't see the problem.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#152

Post by jonathan_gorard »

bhouston wrote: post #148
jonathan_gorard wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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?

Our preprints are currently in peer review (for different journals, I should add). Nothing terrible has happened yet.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#153

Post by fl0wenol »

m12k wrote: post #97

The general tone of the comments here seems to be 'Stephen Wolfram is a pompous ass, so we shouldn't listen to anything he has to say'. After reading through the post I think that, yes, he probably is a pompous ass (you could certainly have trimmed out the paragraphs that sound like a self-congratulatory auto-biography without losing much), but I really hope people don't just ignore this because of that. There are so…

That's great and all.

But if the man decides to distill his current progress into a high-level overview so that a relative layman can understand the team's progress and the implications, then it demonstrates he is aware of an audience and their perceptions, otherwise he wouldn't waste his time writing the summary/blog post.

In the course of all that, he should realize that his own tone is very off-putting and maybe workshop it a bit? Because otherwise it seems very self-indulgent, a bit of mental masturbation in the large, and that itself is a huge red flag.

It is for others to point at someone's work and say, hey, this is huge. If a person says it themselves, then you are right to have serious reservations or skip it.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#154

Post by Synaesthesia »

Octopodes wrote: post #95
sixo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside: let's put "worthy of a mandarin" away forever

I've never heard the expression before. Could someone explain its meaning please?

An official or bureaucrat, particularly one that is reactionary and secretive.

Eg. American Power and The New Mandarins. (Book)

I think it’s an important and relevant term.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#155

Post by meowface »

hobofan wrote: post #140
outlace wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hy…

>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.

It isn't hyperbole, if Bret's claims are substantiated. The claims being that most lab mice are from the Jackson lab, that all of their mice have extremely long telomeres compared to wild mice, and that this could have serious implications on the potential harm to humans by some drugs - even while also accounting for the fact that mice are already not a good model of humans and that the same drugs are later tested on humans. (I could elaborate on this, but it's covered thoroughly in the paper and podcast.)

I agree Eric hasn't satisfactorily proved they didn't change the protocols, but if it is the case that all of their mice still have long telomeres, and if all of the other claims are true (most US researchers still using those mice + the other claims), then the claims "most mice used by US researchers are broken" and "most tests done on mice by US researchers are flawed because of it" are likely also true.

I have no idea if the above claims are true, of course, but they should be investigated on their merits.

Bret Weinstein's 2002 paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11909679

The podcast between Eric and Bret Weinstein covering the full story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s

Not sure if you already listened to the podcast, but if you haven't, I'd recommend listening to all of it.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#156

Post by jdjrirkfkfk »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #47
aaron-santos wrote: post #35

Graph grammars are Turing complete so I don't see why they couldn't express the fundamental theory of physics, but it seems like a weird way of going about the problem.

A turing machine cannot produce randomness, non-determinism.

We dont know if physical randomness truly is so. It could be pseudo random with a seed (superdeterminism)

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#157

Post by JackFr »

knzhou wrote: post #143
JackFr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

But my point is if the CA and the mathematical expression show the same things, then you could say the mathematics are simply a roundabout and confusing way to characterize the CA.

As a thought experiment (and a timely tribute) how would you (mathematically) characterize and/or describe an ongoing evolution of an instances of Conway's Game of Life if you didn't have a grid. Or even better, if you didn't have the grid and you could only see things a resolution of neighborhoods of 10-20 cell resolutions? You might be able to come up with some crazy complex math which does it. But if you knew about the grid and the underlying rules it would explain all of the observations perfectly AND more simply.

Don't get me wrong -- I don't think Wolfram has done that, nor do I really hold out hope that it could be true. But it's a real compelling, if only it were.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#158

Post by jonathan_gorard »

bhouston wrote: post #150
carlob wrote: post #109

If 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?

They already have, as I said in response to your other version of the same question :)

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#159

Post by 9q9 »

jonathan_gorard wrote: post #152
bhouston wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you guys planning on submitting your novel findings to peer reviewed physics journals? Have you done that? How has that gone?

Our preprints are currently in peer review (for different journals, I should add). Nothing terrible has happened yet.

Why didn't you wait with the announcements until after the pre-prints were accepted by reputable journals?

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#160

Post by airstrike »

9q9 wrote: post #159
jonathan_gorard wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our preprints are currently in peer review (for different journals, I should add). Nothing terrible has happened yet.

Why didn't you wait with the announcements until after the pre-prints were accepted by reputable journals?

Because they don't need to?
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