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The Wolfram Physics Project

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#181

Post by mnemonicsloth »

gfodor wrote: post #46
covidacct wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. The problem here is that exactly the ideas he's proposing to explore have already been explored. I've slightly edited my previous comment to point this out. The problem, in the very particular case of this blog post, is that the cost for lacking intellectual humility is spending time reinventing other people's wheels. And those wheels won't get him as far as he thinks they will. We know because they've already…

That makes sense. I can't assess your argument given my lack of understanding. In my own experience though, deriving things from first principles, even if they've been re-invented countless other times, is a good way to build up the intellectual super structures necessary to think new thoughts. I think we should separate: - Wolfram acting as though he thought of the ideas first - Wolfram being underinformed so as to…

You say:

> Wolfram [is] acting as though he thought of the ideas first.

This is called plagiarism. Independent reinvention is no defense if you keep on acting as though you had the idea first. He has already been informed many times that parts of his work are not original, and his behavior doesn't change.

And he knows it, on some level. He made the decision to communicate his "discoveries" in press releases and self-published books. He knows he's not subjecting himself to peer review. He may know, on some level, that his work couldn't pass it. He sued one of his employees to prevent him (the employee) from publishing a proof that Wolfram claimed he had discovered in his book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

I understand what you're up to in trying to invent a psychology that explains his bad behavior, but at some point you have to withdraw empathy and think pragmatically about consequences. Wolfram's actions are already more than sufficient to disgrace an ordinary academic. He's damaged at least one career that we know of. He tries to pass himself off as a visionary scientist only he never delivers. If he wasn't independently wealthy no one would be listening to him at all. But non-experts do listen, which is precisely why speaking up against pseudoscience is part of every real scientist's professional responsibilities. Rather than spin these theories, it would be a better use of your time to send Stephen some email urging him to stick to working on Mathematica.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#182

Post by Koshkin »

philipov wrote: post #108
89u034q5t wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if sometimes reinventing the wheel is in fact the efficient procedure and "humility" has nothing to do with it? Simultaneous discoveries and rediscoveries are something rather common. Rather than getting familiarized with some literature and, consequently, getting also tangled with the problems peculiar to how the literature has developed, maybe a fresh start from a different approach is sometimes preferable. Wh…

Yes, for example, it took Lagrange reinventing classical mechanics using the principle of least action to put physics in a spot where quantum mechanics and general relativity could be seen.

To be fair, both quantum mechanics and general relativity were first "seen" without the aid of the Lagrangian. (Not to dismiss its role in later developments.)

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#183

Post by chrisco255 »

knzhou wrote: post #175
jonathan_gorard wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's relatively common practice in academia to make announcements about results while they're still in pre-print form (particularly given how slow the peer review process is for some journals).

It's common practice to "announce" in the sense that you email colleagues about it and give seminars. It's not common practice to do a press blitz, solely directed at an audience that will be unable to criticize it.

The internet is pretty good at criticizing things.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#184

Post by knzhou »

chrisco255 wrote: post #183
knzhou wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's common practice to "announce" in the sense that you email colleagues about it and give seminars. It's not common practice to do a press blitz, solely directed at an audience that will be unable to criticize it.

The internet is pretty good at criticizing things.

Well yeah, but a lot of the criticism is baseless. For example, you have people downthread saying things like "this can't be right because it's discrete", or, "it's inherently impossible for a theory of everything to make predictions", and so on. These aren't true at all.

Every physicist knows that if you want good criticism, you need to go to people with relevant expertise. That's what peer review is!

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#185

Post by leni536 »

heavyarms wrote: post #23

Anybody who has coded Game of Life can draw a parallel to this. Simple rules can lead to arbitrarily complex systems. I'm all on board with this concept. Graph theory is amazing and useful in many ways we don't understand yet. I'm all on board with this concept as well. But a graph has nodes and edges. Nodes, in this case, can be particles.. I guess? But what are the edges? When a "simple rule" is applied to a collec…

I don't know anything about Wolfram's theory, but if it were me to create a graph theoretical foundation for Physics then nodes would be events, and maybe edges would be particles. Very Feynman-graph-like.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#186

Post by chrisco255 »

crazygringo wrote: post #103

As much as the guy can be annoying, the associated "Project Announcement" is a fascinating 20,000-word-ish article. [1] I've long assumed that the basic structure of the universe must be some kind of graph, simply because it's the most elementary structure there seems to be, and so easily gives rise to dimensionality. So seeing someone try to tackle this bottom-up and see if it can ultimately give rise to quantum mec…

Do you think the simulation uses Neo4J or JanusGraph?

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#187

Post by nil-sec »

jonathan_gorard wrote: post #158
bhouston wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I’ve read through your GR part. Just to counter all the negativity here, congrats for pulling this off! I felt your papers do a much better job in explaining what’s actually the idea. Probably would be better to directly link to them here on HN. I’m a bit rusty but everything you write seems very reasonable to me. One thing I was a bit nervous about, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that you seem to somewhat artificially put in “causal invariance” by restricting all hyper graphs you consider to those that have this property. This isn’t obvious from the rule itself and it seems like it could just go wrong at one point deep into the time evolution. Are you worried about that?

Edit: Additionally the model seems very flexible. To the point that I’m unsure whether it’s surprising to be able to recover GR and other properties. I’m out of my depth here but given that string theory seems to face a similar problem of model selection have you looked at equivalences between those or does this not make sense in your eyes?

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#188

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #170
9q9 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In a lot of physics areas, things move very fast, so generally people submit to a journal and arXiv simultaneously, in case someone else posts on arXiv first and goes down in history as first. However, rarely are arxiv publications accompanied by such fan fare.

Yes, but press releases are only released after papers have been accepted, not only by journals, but overall by the scientific community.

Specially for papers that claim new or bold things.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#189

Post by mnemonicsloth »

dang wrote: post #138

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:…

> 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.

If you really can't stand it then kill the thread. But Wolfram is a bad actor in a discipline that runs on reputation. He needs to be talked about.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#190

Post by leni536 »

lalaithion wrote: post #48

I'm pretty sure that this would violate Bell's theorem, and I'd love an explanation of why it wouldn't. It looks to me like a system of local, hidden variables, unless there's some sense in which changes in the hypergraph can propagate faster than the speed of light.

It doesn't look like a local theory at all.
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