This guy is so full of himself. He is going to explode anytime.
We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
301–310 of 376 posts
Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wolfram deserves accolades for Mathematica. It's a magnificent achievement and he's kept his company alive and thriving and people use Wolfram (the company) tools everyday to do productive stuff. BUT... Wolfram (the man) is very much an outsider when it comes to physics. This started 20 years ago when he published a "A New Kind of Science". It was a lengthy but ultimately not useful exploration of cellular automata (…
It may or may not be correct, but to get hung up on the ego and the name on the paper is a big mistake. Read the ideas. Maybe they're too weird to understand. But don't condemn them because where they came from. Find the flaws and do it scientifically.
It's an interesting idea but it's still very nascent and speculative.
In these last couple of years, Wolfram has been talking about a "universe building kit". He posits that universes (including our own universe) and it's time evolution can be described by relatively simple "hypergraph" that modifies itself and that fully describes physical laws including the concepts that would unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. His thinking is that we just have to somehow "find" that hypergraph and we'll know everything all the way back to "t=0".
Not surprisingly, the physics community doesn't seem interested in dropping whatever they're doing and pursuing this. But like I said, it's OK. The only gripe I would have is if he started trying to getting funding from sources which other scientific researchers use now. The concern is that he would just roll out his obscurantist papers and talks and convince people with the purse-strings to fork over money for this idea that COULD HAVE GONE towards more legitimate pursuits. As it is now, high-energy physics already gets what many consider to be "too much" funding and it's been rather fruitful. This hypergraph stuff... meh.
Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is a judgement of character not "of substance"? Where is the substance in an erroneous accusation of ad-hominem?
The most direct path to prove my point would be to start calling you names.
only if you consider that a judgement of character (or at least, one equivalent to the OP).
Can you fully expand on the things you say rather than leaving them cryptic? I'm having to guess what point you are making.
Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you scroll down a bit, I think the 26th paragraph comes closest to lucidity: - "What will the Wolfram Institute be like? There’ll be a leadership core, which, yes, I’m signing up to head. But the main meat of the institute will be a collection of researchers and fellows, working on particular, managed projects—together with students at multiple levels from high school to graduate school. We’ll be doing open scienc…
Even people who don't care much for cellular automata must respect Mathematica. So seeing that they plan to develop a lot of "open tools" is interesting. Even if nothing comes of the research itself, the tools they develop could be valuable.
> must respect Mathematica.
Respect a closed-source software which you can't easily check and improve, for academic work? No. It's a tool, not an academic achievement.
Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wolfram deserves accolades for Mathematica. It's a magnificent achievement and he's kept his company alive and thriving and people use Wolfram (the company) tools everyday to do productive stuff. BUT... Wolfram (the man) is very much an outsider when it comes to physics. This started 20 years ago when he published a "A New Kind of Science". It was a lengthy but ultimately not useful exploration of cellular automata (…
I suppose you are not familiar with his early career as a physicist, publishing in the field since he was 15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram#Early_career
That was 40+ years ago.
Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
#306What’s with the hate? Let the man do his research. It’s not tax payer dollars. The number of tax-dollar paid academics who are doing research as “useless” as his (useless defined by the haters) vastly outnumber the ones at Wolfram.
Alan Kay has part of the answer in this talk [0] where elucidates the errors taken by formal Comp Sci education.
He claims there was a battle in the university between testable curriculum centered around Algorithms and builder curriculums based around hardware and distributed systems, and says it's a shame that algorithms won out.
[0] Alan Kay : July 2007 : A Conversation with CMU Faculty & Students https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8
Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
What he is trying to do is that he is trying to create a computational theory to explain the world. As opposed to pure mathematics which isn't computational. Not really that crazy. He may be off putting at times but when he gets in to it he can be very interesting to listen to.
Pure math isn’t computational? o_O (Constructivist mathematics is a thing, and it is pretty easy to formulate physics in a constructivist framework. Many serious quantum theoreticians do.)
Well no. It doesn't say how to progress from one state to another. It just tells us how numbers relate to each other.
This isn't perfect but something like, math express things while computation progresses things.
You could argue that a particular mathematical framework is computational but I'm just trying to exemplify a distinction.
Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most direct path to prove my point would be to start calling you names.
only if you consider that a judgement of character (or at least, one equivalent to the OP). Can you fully expand on the things you say rather than leaving them cryptic? I'm having to guess what point you are making.
No I cannot fully expand on what I say. I can not predict the full extent of how you will interpret my words. You need good faith to be more valuable that a programmable object. This is why you assume the best about a person and if you overestimate then you carry the discussion forward.
This is why unquestioning criticism, judgement, is of no substance.
Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
#309Man these are some low-quality comments. You’d think Wolfram was torturing gerbils or something. I don’t mind criticisms of my favorite thinkers. I enjoy watching someone being taken to task in the battle of ideas so to speak, but apparently something about Wolfram just rubs people the wrong way, because they seem to lose the ability to make cogent arguments after reading him. As a simple example of what a healthy di…
I'd cut Stephen Wolfram some slack if he published his work in a peer reviewed journal - like a proper scientist does.
Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pure math isn’t computational? o_O (Constructivist mathematics is a thing, and it is pretty easy to formulate physics in a constructivist framework. Many serious quantum theoreticians do.)
Well no. It doesn't say how to progress from one state to another. It just tells us how numbers relate to each other. This isn't perfect but something like, math express things while computation progresses things. You could argue that a particular mathematical framework is computational but I'm just trying to exemplify a distinction.
I don't think this is an accurate take on math. Beyond the fact that a lot of math fields deal explicitly with state updates (e.g. discrete math), there is also the constructionist framework for mathematical foundations which removes "non-computational" theorems like that law of the excluded middle. When you do this you get a form of math where all proofs are necessarily computational and there is a viable direct translation into code. It is not generally why many constructivist mathematicians are interested in that framework, but it is a nice side-effect.
I think your intuitions about how math works is an unfortunate side effect of how math is often taught, and not so much reflected in mathematics itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...