Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Wolfram Physics Project

writings.stephenwolfram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 342 posts

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#201

Post by catalogia »

knzhou wrote: post #198
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:…

There's a pernicious effect going on, though. You can see on the Twitter threads about this that people are asking physics professors what they think -- and they're all weaselling out, saying stuff like "No comment." Why? Because from decades of experience they know that nothing is going to stop the hype train: at best they'll be ignored and at worst they'll be tarred in some articles as hidebound reactionaries. But…

> There's a pernicious effect going on, though. You can see on the Twitter threads about this that people are asking physics professors what they think -- and they're all weaselling out, saying stuff like "No comment.

I am quite confident their criticism will eventually come. "No comment" doesn't mean "I will never comment on this." Criticisms take time to formulate, you'll need to be a bit more patient.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#202

Post by jjoonathan »

covidacct wrote: post #114
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…

The substance a good dsl for implementing rewrite/string substitution systems, as well as (likely high-quality) implementations of algorithms causal invariants, knuth-bendix completion, graph isomorphism, etc. [1]. A lot of that pre-existed the Wolfram Physics Project. The new thing appears to be: 1. a rebranding with improved documentation / learning resources for using those features (hey, documentation is hard! di…

Seconded! Nothing beats Mathematica at mapping the concepts of mathematics into software. In certain verticals, sure, but overall? Wolfram has been spinning this flywheel for decades, and it shows.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#203

Post by mattkrause »

GuiA wrote: post #145
alkonaut wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So did a lot of other people who aren’t extreme narcissists. I think it’s reasonable to find someone’s work admirable and yet think they have terrible personalities. There is a line of thought were people should be judged by what they create rather than how they behave, but luckily not many subscribe to it. Not even grown-up Linus Torvalds subscribes to it.

Has there been any issues of Wolfram assaulting/harassing/abusing/etc other people? Or are people just upset about the pompous style of his writing? Those are different kinds of “behavior”. Because while we should totally condemn the former, it seems that we’re discussing the latter here, and it’s hard to get riled up about.

Matthew Cook?

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#204

Post by crispyambulance »

Reedx wrote: post #151
crispyambulance wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What breakthrough for Eric Weinstein? So far he's just been doing this grandiose marketing push where talks in dense comically impenetrable jargon TO LAYMEN (eg the Joe Rogan show) and releases bizarre rambling videos on youtube that attempt to tie together politics, history, his beef with academia and his "theory of everything". It smells like bullshit but people seem to gobble it up and call him a genius, for what?…

Eric says his theory is a work in progress, may be wrong and may even be fool's gold (his words). That's a ways off from claiming breakthrough. And I don't see him selling magic pills or some get rich quick scheme. It seems to me he's just exploring ideas in the open. That's great. I don't see the problem.

But he's not really exploring the ideas "in the open".

He is making REALLY HUGE claims in advance of releasing the actual products of his supposed 3 decades of work. He is making these claims in popular media and creating a buzz-- first. I suppose that's his prerogative, but it doesn't seem like science to me. The scientists I admire most take ENORMOUS effort to communicate clearly, adjust to their audience, focus on making compelling arguments, and above all "show their work". This guy does the exact opposite.

One other thing he keeps on citing is this bizarre quote from Dirac: > "... it is more important to have beauty in one's equations that to have them fit experiment...".

That's perfectly fine, for a while, but it doesn't BECOME PHYSICS until it agrees with experiment at a minimum.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#205

Post by dang »

knzhou wrote: post #198
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:…

There's a pernicious effect going on, though. You can see on the Twitter threads about this that people are asking physics professors what they think -- and they're all weaselling out, saying stuff like "No comment." Why? Because from decades of experience they know that nothing is going to stop the hype train: at best they'll be ignored and at worst they'll be tarred in some articles as hidebound reactionaries. But…

You're welcome to criticize substantively. I took a quick look at your comments and didn't see any WDS. Maybe just a little.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#206

Post by dang »

mnemonicsloth wrote: post #189
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.

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 know what it is: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... It helps with quickly answering questions that might otherwise be conundrums. A previous example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#207

Post by mnemonicsloth »

jonathan_gorard wrote: post #152
bhouston wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you guys planning on submitting your novel findings to peer reviewed physics journals? Have you done that? How has that gone?

Our preprints are currently in peer review (for different journals, I should add). Nothing terrible has happened yet.

Right. Except for all this fanfare. Why is it necessary to celebrate the writing of two papers like this?

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#208

Post by lazzlazzlazz »

covidacct wrote: post #27

After a few iterations, I think I understand the point of this piece. It was a bit difficult to hone in on, though. The article suggests that working out the theory of something like rule production systems, and then figuring out how that theory relates to existing insights from physics, is the best path toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics. My primary source of skepticism stems from the fact that the theory of rul…

> For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a very old and extremely well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory.

What are the names for these old, well-studied things in programming language theory, so we can look them up?

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#209

Post by seph-reed »

MengerSponge wrote: post #19
teh_g wrote: post #2

The phrase 'a new kind of science' is a huge red flag, but apart from this I don't think I can evaluate what I'm reading. Does the article make any sense? Does it at least hint at a useful direction? Or is this a case of someone holding a hammer (the language) and seeing everything as a nail (how the universe works)?

It doesn't pass the smell test. I'll be very diplomatic and say this to our high school and undergrad readers: Mathematica is a lovely program, but working for this man on this project will not do good things for your scientific career. Among the many many many red flags, Wolfram claims to have discovered that complexity can emerge from simple rules in the early 80's. This is a full decade after P. W. Anderson's semi…

> Among the many many many red flags, Wolfram claims to have discovered that complexity can emerge from simple rules in the early 80's

Total red flag. His obsession with this - though - does not seem ill placed. As far as smell tests go, I think this thread is worth pulling.

Re: The Wolfram Physics Project

#210

Post by bronzeage »

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

The graph rewriting is cool and novel. I do agree that cellular automata are somewhat limited. Their most obvious limitation is having Manhattan distance. 4 or 8 directions to move through in lower level is something that effects large scale. But most of the models wolfram proposes still produce some grid-like structure, and in some sense his visualization is misleading.

Post reply on HN