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The Wolfram Physics Project

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#261

Post by Rury »

How is what’s mentioned here, not just the old idea of determinism demonstrated or shown from a different perspective?

I always thought science was biased toward the assumption that the universe follows basic deterministic rules, and the purpose of doing science was to find the nature of those rules. What I mean by this, is that when we do science, we are trying to determine the nature behind things - are we not? Therefore, determining things, or determinism, is at the heart of doing science. Assuming otherwise, seems like a disservice to practicing science, but maybe that's just me?

Granted, I know nothing is settled yet, but I have a hard time seeing anything new here. Just old ideas communicated in an analogous new perspective…

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#262

Post by dang »

mnemonicsloth wrote: post #239
dang wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't need to be talked about for the thousandth time in the way he always gets talked about—not on HN, at least, and it's easy to see why: this is a site for intellectual curiosity. Curiosity withers under repetition and fries under indignation. What happens to it under the combo? exercise for the reader. This is one of those cases where it's super helpful to have a single thing you're optimizing and for and to…

An environment full of misleading information doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity. It penalizes it. And a one-sided discussion about Stephen Wolfram is highly misleading -- even worse than no discussion at all. So I stand by what I said earlier. If you can't stand to hear the case against Stephen Wolfram then kill this thread.

The discussion isn't one-sided in the way you mean. Take out the dreck and it's still highly critical. For example, the top comment (not counting my moderation alert) begins "I don't see anything of substance here".

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#263

Post by comment_ran »

knzhou wrote: post #102

I 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…

This reminds me what Feynman talk to us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM-zWTU7X-k

> If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery. It is very nearly impossible, but not quite, to find any theory which agrees with experiments over the entire range in which all theories have been checked, and yet gives different consequences in some other range, even a theory whose different consequences do not turn out to agree with nature. A new idea is extremely difficult to think of. It takes a fantastic imagination.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#264

Post by codethief »

gfodor wrote: post #42
DubiousPusher wrote: post #40

Earlier 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.

I believe it because it seems to be the consensus I gather whenever I read articles about theoretical physics' hunt for the unified theory. I'm talking about that problem specifically. The search for the unified theory sounds basically dead, and we have a generation of physicists who have spent their careers going down dead ends. The meme seems to be for the field to move past it and focus on more "productive" areas…

Sure, theoretical high-energy physics (i.e. particle physics) seems to be in somewhat of a dead end when it comes to finding a theory of everything. But this is an incredibly small part of theoretical physics.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#265

Post by AgentME »

bronzeage wrote: post #210

I'm a big fan of Gerard t' Hooft's Cellular Automata Interpretation. Most of the things described by Wolfram were already there, in fact, I would argue that most of the things with strict connection to real physics were already described by Gerard t' Hooft in a similar manner (energy and momentum interpretations are very similar) However, they are different in that Gerard t'Hooft has a single ontic state where Wolfra…

>where Wolfram has branching from undeterministic applications of rules. I'm not sure how Wolfram can derive unitary evolution.

I don't think it's right to call it nondeterministic: every possible sequence of rules happens, separately. It seems to lend itself easily to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#266

Post by jl2718 »

_jal wrote: post #172
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #146

Incorrect 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.

Take it further - eventually we will have conceptual physicists whose output is judged on purely aesthetic grounds, and rich people will collect them.

That’s called string theory.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#267

Post by AgentME »

fspeech wrote: post #243
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…

Could I understand the effort this way? In general any Turing complete set of computational rules should be able to generate any computable expression and hopefully physics can be expressed with computable expressions (at least if it is at all comprehensible to humans). So you are looking for a particular set of rules (instead of the English language and math symbols, e.g.) that meet certain kind of aesthetics. Do yo…

From the main article, it looks like they believe that relativity and quantum mechanics are both things that directly emerge as necessary consequences from the structure, not that those are arbitrary results that may be computed inside. It wouldn't be very interesting in the latter case; there's no shortage of Turing tarpits.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#268

Post by palimpsests »

api wrote: post #65
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?

It's been waiting for a genius, a visionary, a maverick, ... Wolfram's narcissism is so extreme it's just comical. When I was really into complexity science and stuff everyone in the field would joke about it, suggesting a drinking game where you take a shot every time Wolfram refers to how he was a gifted child or started studying math in his teens or single-handedly accomplished some amazing feat. The guy toots his…

He certainly toots his own horn so incredibly much. I could never make it through NKS.

Also, can't we observe photons older than human species with our naked eyes without taking up amateur astronomy?

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#270

Post by rantwasp »

zakk wrote: post #223

This is absolutely fascinating. Even just a demonstration that rule application on hypergraphs is expressive enough to potentially describe (for some rule yet to be found) Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity is incredibly exciting in my opinion. Arguably string theory is in a similar situation: a very powerful framework that could potentially describe reality if accurately utilized. Also, notably Gerard 't Hooft…

the idea is kind of old and even Wolfram played with it in his previous work/book, ie A new kind of science.

If you're interested in the subject and also can appreciate what feels like a piece of performance art give the following book a shot: https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Information-Theory-Psychedelic-... It's mind-blowing and uses as one of its starting points Wofram's 1D cellular automata work.

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