11–20 of 83 posts
All: please let's not repeat the usual comments about Wolfram himself. They were a cliché on HN already a decade ago*, and many years before that on the web at large. It's a good test for the community whether we can focus on what's new/different/interesting here and resist the temptation to noise. * ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... )
Are there any well respect physicists or research groups independent of Wolfram's group who are taking this seriously or collaborating with Wolfram Physics project? I would expect something like "an here is Max Planck Institute for Physics collaborating with Wolfram Physics research project on ...". Or something of that nature. At least after all these years.
Edit: When the technical papers appeared in 2020, I personally went through them in some detail. Tl;dr there are almost no novel ideas of substance in there.
Specifically I looked at the "launch documents" provided here:
https://wolframphysics.org/technical-documents/
which, to my knowledge, still are the closest we have to a coherent description of what the grand vision is. Unfortunately I didn't keep my detailed notes, but looking specifically at the relativistic paper, it might appear substantial, but that is because large parts of it review well-known basic results in discrete geometry and causal sets. The actual content is described in a hand wavy way, with little in calculations or rigor (and some elementary mistakes, too).
The issue is that everything that goes beyond standard results is essentially wishful thinking or circular. "If my update rules are such that they produce a causal structure that corresponds to that of a 4-dimensional spacetime, then the wolfram model produces a 4-dimensional spacetime!". This would be interesting if there was any way to characterize the update rules that do so. However, there is not. There is simply the implication that since update rules are very general it must surely be possible to find one that does. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the reader.
A prime example is in Section 3.3:
In all that follows, we shall assume one further condition on the hypergraph update rules, beyond mere causal invariance: namely, “asymptotic dimensionality preservation”. Loosely speaking, this means that the dimensionality of the causal graph show converge to some fixed, finite value as the number of updating events grows arbitrarily large.
However, abstractly defining ensembles of causal graphs that actually produce (at least with high likelihood) the causal graphs of low dimensional manifolds is exactly the core of the issue. If you are able to do that, then the standard results of causal set theory get you the rest of the way. This central difficulty is simply "assumed" to be solved. No further discussion is given on what type of update rules would actually be dimensionality preserving, nor is this identified as a key research question, nor is any evidence or heuristic provided that WOlframs approach has anything new to say on this problem.
As far as I recall the quantum mechanics paper was even worse.
Before people get too excited about this, note that Wolfram has been on about his own fundamental theory of everything for some time, and the wider physics community does not take it seriously. His book 'A New Kind of Science' has him taking credit for others' discoveries going back to Turing. Here are two recent critiques of this work: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic... https://arxiv.org…
Away from the fact that this is not taken seriously by the physics community. This is the first time we have a chance to use crypto to support a fundamental physics research \s [1] [1] https://www.wolframphysics.org/membership/
> One-time $100 donation
This actually had me laugh out loud. I must've been a poor kid
This is a good introduction to it by Stephen Wolfram himself[0]. [0]: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
Does anyone understand this theory? When I read through it and listened to his talk, it sounded like a bunch of different ideas stitched together without an underlying explanation.
And, yes it takes a while to digest...you have to invest some time in reading both authors series on the subject...but its well worth the read.
This is a good introduction to it by Stephen Wolfram himself[0]. [0]: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
What makes it "good"?
Are there any well respect physicists or research groups independent of Wolfram's group who are taking this seriously or collaborating with Wolfram Physics project? I would expect something like "an here is Max Planck Institute for Physics collaborating with Wolfram Physics research project on ...". Or something of that nature. At least after all these years.
I used to work close to people who were actually somewhat close to the stuff contained in the papers. The consensus was that there is nothing of substance to engage with. Edit: When the technical papers appeared in 2020, I personally went through them in some detail. Tl;dr there are almost no novel ideas of substance in there. Specifically I looked at the "launch documents" provided here: https://wolframphysics.org/t…
Away from the fact that this is not taken seriously by the physics community. This is the first time we have a chance to use crypto to support a fundamental physics research \s [1] [1] https://www.wolframphysics.org/membership/
Sorry, I know this is a bit snark-heavy for HN but I can’t help but feel impressed by the way cryptocurrency has somehow succeeded in associating itself with so many ills of modern society.