101–110 of 342 posts
So basically this: https://xkcd.com/505/ huh Stephen? -Question has anyone validated and/or disproved his Geometric Rules based approach and NKS Cellular automata against traditional physics models and found predictable conclusions that can be tested via experiment? IE is it really anything other alternative notation/representation system? It essentially presupposes a computational canvas to the universe,but in what…
1. make a set of dynamical rules that matches general relativity in the low energy limit, such as recovering Lorentz invariance and the Einstein field equation (this is supposed to be the easiest part -- without at least doing this, a theory of everything is worth less than the graph doodles in my middle school notebooks)
2. demonstrate that you can add something that looks like matter
3. reproduce effects that we know have to appear in quantum gravity in the semiclassical limit, such as Hawking radiation and black hole entropy
4. demonstrate that you can add matter that behaves like the Standard Model
5. make specific predictions that we didn't already know from purely semiclassical considerations
6. find a way to verify those predictions
7. have the predictions actually be correct upon verification
These 7 steps are hard, which is why nobody has managed to do them. But it looks like Wolfram hasn't even bothered to start on step 1. His new book is just hundreds and hundreds of pages of pretty graphs and big words. It's more akin to a reformulation of the foundations of mathematics than a theory of physics -- and it's not a particularly good one, at that.
It's the same complaint I have about category theorists trying to do applied physics. (And category theory is a much more powerful language than Wolfram's!) Yes, you might have an incredibly general language, with which you can talk about vast swaths of possible physical theories. But we already had way too many possibilities using ordinary mathematics! We need to narrow down on specifics, not muddy the waters by making things even more general. I mean, it's like trying to rescue a startup by translating the documentation into Esperanto.
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 mechanics and beyond sure is fun to watch.
[1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
This makes perfect sense, bravo. Go straight to the most general structure possible and try to understand which part of the infinite mathematical structure of the multiverse we inhabit. How interesting that within all possible structures they have found objects that so readily match up with our own reality.
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…
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…
Yep. A whole lot of this is "Automata are relevant! I'm relevant!" and some hand-waving and "Doesn't this loooook like a mesh? See! We made space-time!" Save your time, just read More is Different: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
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…
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…
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...