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An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

wolframphysics.org

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Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#31

Post by mathinaly »

leephillips wrote: post #23

In over 20 years since the publication of A New Kind of Science , Wolfram’s approach had not led to a single prediction, neither verified nor falsified, about the natural world. I would very much like to be corrected about this if I’m wrong. Physicists show that their ideas have substance by solving problems. But Wolfram’s ideas don’t tell us the masses of the elementary particles, the drag of the flow of water throu…

The paradigm he's using is too open ended. In quantum mechanics the mathematics is based on Hilbert spaces and unitary evolutions of state vectors. You might ask why this is the case and it is because of conservation principles. Unitary evolution preserves "information" in the state vector throughout its physical evolution. This is not the case for Wolfram's theories. There are no conservation principles in cellular automata other than explicitly forcing the evolution of the automaton to actually preserve the relevant information. More generally, most computational theories of physics are much too lax about the relevant conservation principles and that is why his theory does not predict anything. Turing machines specifically are not required to preserve anything about the initial state and so information can be destroyed and created ex nihilo, violating the main principle of physics which requires that all matter and energy be conserved. The equations have to balance out at the beginning and the end, whatever you start with can not be greater or less than what you end with (at least in physics).

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#32

Post by Viliam1234 »

andrepd wrote: post #15
cloudking wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that it's a mathematical structure so open-ended that you can write most relevant mathematics in terms of it (as you can with e.g. set theory). And of course, if you can write math you can write physics.

Yes. The problem is that you can write any physics in it, so you cannot use it to figure out anything about our universe.

This is a crucial part that many intelligent people somehow utterly fail to understand. If you can explain everything (including the things that are not true), you can explain nothing.

A theory that explains, is a theory that says "...therefore, X can happen, but Y can't happen". Like a mathematician who says that 2+2 is 4, but also says that 2+2 is not 5. Or a physicist who says "apples fall down from the tree, they don't fall up".

Compare that to a "genius" mathematician or physicist who simply says "yes" to everything. Is 2+2=4? Yes. Is 2+2=5? Yes. Do apples fall down? Yes. Do apples fall up? Yes. And then people on internet are deeply impressed that he can answer everything. Such an amazing skill! Ask him about gravitons, he has a clear answer. Ask him about dark matter, he has a clear answer. Ask him about time travel, he also has a clear answer. The only problem is that he can both write a physics that contains gravitons, and a physics that does not contain gravitons. Etc.

Ultimately, we want to know what is real about our universe. (Or multiverse, or whatever.) A model that says "yes" to both the things that are true and the things that are false, is useless. After you figure out what is true, you get "yeah, my model explains that". Problem is, the model explains the opposite just as well.

...then you take a step back, and remember that "can write anything" is simply a different way to say "Turing-complete". Yes, if you invent something that is Turing-complete, you can simulate a universe in it. Any universe. Both the ones that exist, and the ones that don't.

(And the idea of Turing-completeness was discovered a few decades before Wolfram was born. So we can't even credit him with inventing the concept. He just uses the concept to impress people who either never heard about it, or never connected the dots.)

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#33

Post by K0balt »

stouset wrote: post #20
elashri wrote: post #7

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/

As if ransomware, money laundering, pump and dump schemes, and tax evasion weren’t enough, now cryptocurrency can be used to support pseudoscience! Will the wonders never cease? 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.

For all the various ills it is sometimes associated with, cryptocurrency remains the only frictionless, 100% transparent, publicly accessible international monetary and payment system.

That seems like something we would want, the ability to freely transfer payment from one individual to another, internationally, contractually, and transparently.

The only interests that I would think would want that gone are those that profit from the many choke points in our financial systems. Sure, speculators and opportunists have leveraged benefits, and they are the ones you always hear about… you don’t hear about the millions of people quietly managing their private and legal financial affairs, because when you use it for that, it just works -exactly as designed.

FWIW I think you can much more easily associate cash with all kinds of shady and socially caustic uses, but for whatever reason not very many cryptocurrency critics are out to abolish cash, which I would think would be the poster child for seedy, shady, toxic commerce.

But, sure, crypto bad and whatever.

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#34

Post by ProAm »

ahazred8ta wrote: post #29
ProAm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually the first Ive heard about any negativity. Are there a couple articles about whats not to like? To be far, I only know about his website and some tool, and that he's intelligent and good at math (which is likely not enough knowledge about that guy), but I always assumed his work was geared towards serious researchers and not really meant for someone like me (little math and physics). I'm not trying to…

He was a child prodigy and published world-class work on quarks, QM, and subatomic particles while he was still a teenager. More recently he has been more interested in an imaginary world that only exists in his imagination and on paper. He's made a lot of discoveries there and insists that the analogy between his discoveries and the real world is major big brain stuff. He's still very productive in math and computer…

Thank you. Thats not as bad as I thought it was going to be based on the comments.

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#35

Post by drdeca »

Certhas wrote: post #28
drdeca wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen it claimed that the project has led to to a way of doing a numerical simulation of GR which is, in some cases more efficient? If true, that still seems like something of merit, even if the project doesn’t give any progress in fundamental understanding of physics? Maybe, rather than as they hope, being a path towards a theory of everything, it could instead be a path towards a framework for understanding goo…

If you have a citation or more information on that, I'd be curious. Numerical relativity is outside my area of expertise. It doesn't seem likely to me, but I couldn't rule it out...

I believe this is what I was thinking of : https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07508

The author is Jonathan Gorard, who is one of the people associated with “The Wolfram Physics Project”, and checking the references, it does cite at least one document/paper that is part of the “wolfram physics project”,

But I don’t know for sure whether it exactly uses the central framework of the project.

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#36

Post by meindnoch »

Oh, this is still a thing?

Last time I checked, their claim was that the universe can be modelled as a sufficiently large hypergraph rewriting system, with some initial state, and some set of rules. Which initial state? Which set of rules? Well, uh... some!

It's like saying that the Universe can be modelled as a Turing machine, with sufficiently large memory. (or a bunch of pebbles: https://xkcd.com/505/)

Are there any new claims from them?

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#37

Post by aj7 »

ProAm wrote: post #34
ahazred8ta wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was a child prodigy and published world-class work on quarks, QM, and subatomic particles while he was still a teenager. More recently he has been more interested in an imaginary world that only exists in his imagination and on paper. He's made a lot of discoveries there and insists that the analogy between his discoveries and the real world is major big brain stuff. He's still very productive in math and computer…

Thank you. Thats not as bad as I thought it was going to be based on the comments.

The challenge, for historians of science, is to segregate Wolfram’s genuine accomplishments, which are considerable, from this stuff.

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#38

Post by VirusNewbie »

mathinaly wrote: post #31
leephillips wrote: post #23

In over 20 years since the publication of A New Kind of Science , Wolfram’s approach had not led to a single prediction, neither verified nor falsified, about the natural world. I would very much like to be corrected about this if I’m wrong. Physicists show that their ideas have substance by solving problems. But Wolfram’s ideas don’t tell us the masses of the elementary particles, the drag of the flow of water throu…

The paradigm he's using is too open ended. In quantum mechanics the mathematics is based on Hilbert spaces and unitary evolutions of state vectors. You might ask why this is the case and it is because of conservation principles. Unitary evolution preserves "information" in the state vector throughout its physical evolution. This is not the case for Wolfram's theories. There are no conservation principles in cellular…

>. Turing machines specifically are not required to preserve anything about the initial state and so information can be destroyed and created ex nihilo, violating the main principle of physics which requires that all matter and energy be conserved. The equations have to balance out at the beginning and the end, whatever you start with can not be greater or less than what you end with (at least in physics).

can you explain this more rigorously? I don't see how computation 'destorys' information, unless you are using "destroy" loosely and you just mean exploding the state space?

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#39

Post by zachf »

sesm wrote: post #4
cloudking wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's like string theory - a framework with tons of free parameters which will never produce a coherent physical theory, but you can always write a paper that contains a promise of explaining any observation with the right fine-tuning of some parameters (the promise will never be fulfilled, of course).

There are exactly zero free parameters in string theory [0]. The details of why string phenomenology is hard is a difficult subject, but the characterization you've given of it is not correct. If you have a proof that string theory is not self-consistent, you should publish it, because there is no such proof in the scientific literature today. (Source: my PhD in physics.)

Unfortunately, there is a ton of misinformation about this topic on the web. For example, people love to say that string theory predicts anything and everything. But it predicts (and rejects) a lot; it’s just that all of the known predictions happen to fall into the categories of (1) predicting things that are very hard for humans to measure (behavior of black holes at long time scales, graviton scattering, etc) or (2) retrodicting things we already know are true (e.g. gravity, Lorentz invariance, etc.). This state of things isn’t by design of nefarious string theorists designing their theory to be untestable, it’s just cruel fate of what comes out of the math. Hopefully someday we can find some other type of prediction, but string theory isn’t easy.

[0] See e.g. https://indico.cern.ch/event/630393/contributions/2890113/at...

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#40

Post by jobtemp »

elashri wrote: post #7

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/

That is as exciting as them accepting different fiat currencies. Yes I can convert to Yen then donate or just donate.
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