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

An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

wolframphysics.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 83 posts

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#51

Post by drdeca »

mellosouls wrote: post #44
drdeca wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well the problem is that's then essentially people involved in the project making claims about the project. That's obviously not satisfactory as a positive independent assessment, which is what this thread is calling for.

Sure, this was just me saying “I think this was the thing based-on/using it, that was said to work well”, not “here is someone saying it works well”.

The “gravitas” program is open source, so perhaps some external people may have evaluated how useful it is? (Unless it is hard to get running, idk.)

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#52

Post by refulgentis »

Certhas wrote: post #30
sesm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not even wrong" is a title of a book about String Theory by Peter Woit. I've noticed a common tactic in online disinformation campaigns: taking a common term associated with critique of some concept and spamming it in a different (sometimes opposite) context, to break the semantic link.

Not even wrong is a quip attributed to Wolfgang Pauli. This is where Woit got his blog and book title from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

Oof. Lol. If I ever start rambling about They's malfeasance in Their campaigns, may I receive as humble and direct a reply as this, as soon as possible.

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#53

Post by pyinstallwoes »

zachf wrote: post #39
sesm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 misinformati…

How is string theory useful?

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#54

Post by jiggawatts »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #50
jiggawatts wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Disclaimer: I have a physics degree but I’m not a practicing physicist.) I think the above comment perfectly summarises the situation. There has been a lot of fanfare but no action coming from Wolfram’s research. It’s even more disconnected from physical reality than the more abstract mathematical corners of string theory. The hard part of a TOE is showing how it maps to reality, how the theory constrains what we ca…

I remember looking at the hypergraph stuff a while back and thinking "this can't possibly handle the double slit experiment". I looked through the different pages and found no references to it. I shrugged and moved on. A few years later another blog post by one of the members went up saying "of course we can explain the double slit experiment, from the beginning. We left it out of the early posts on purpose so someon…

My key threshold is the three particle generations, e.g.: electrons, muons, and tau particles.

If your TOE doesn’t even mention them, then that’s a bad sign. Any mention at all will have me sitting up straight and putting my reading glasses on.

Wolfram’s theories are so, so far away from this threshold that it’s hard to even explain to non-physicists.

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#55

Post by FjordWarden »

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.

The mathematical structure is called a hyper graph, a graph where nodes and edges come from the same set. Sounds weird at first but think about it like little sentences of the form subject predicate object. The word google can be all three places, as in: Google is a company, I googled his name or I work at Google. Here Google and its conjugations is an socio-economic object, but the set can also be the different grades within a geometric algebra where the different kind of reflections can be both operator and operand.

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#56

Post by K0balt »

Scarblac wrote: post #48
K0balt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> For all the various ills it is sometimes associated with, cryptocurrency remains the only frictionless, 100% transparent, publicly accessible international monetary and payment system. Its insane energy use, slow speed, high transaction costs, and structural inability to have any legal oversight (for eg reversing fraudulent payments) amount to a huge amount of friction. And the existence of unknown entities with hu…

There are plenty of cryptocurrencies that do not suffer from insane energy use, slow transactions, or lack of oversight… and governments have not historically been very good about crashing currency valuations, if not on a whim than with a catastrophic plan. There are stablecoins that are verifiably and transparently backed, which is more than I can say for any extant government issued currency.

But sure, there are lousy performers in the space, just as the banking system is a poor performer in energy use and speed for many kinds of transactions.

For example, If you stack up the energy use of financial institutions, many SOTA cryptocurrency systems compare extremely favourably on a per transaction basis.

I think people easily forget that the space is not at all homogeneous, and there are vast differences between different blockchains and tokenisation systems.

Lumping them all together is like saying that all government backed currencies are total crap just because so many currencies have seen catastrophic inflation and counterfeiting in the last century.

Many countries debt backed currency projects are actually fairly stable and well managed.

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#57

Post by zachf »

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #53
zachf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 misinformati…

How is string theory useful?

To whom? To other branches of physics? Look up AdS/CFT. To the general public? Dunno, I guess the pursuit of understanding the universe is its own reward for some.

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#58

Post by jpmattia »

qnleigh wrote: post #6

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…

I think the acknowledgements in your second link are interesting:

> I thank Stephen Wolfram for an enjoyable conversation about this review;

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#59

Post by [deleted] »

dakiol wrote: post #18

Despite all the negativity towards Wolfram, he’s one of the few out there whom I’m jealous about. He gets to work on his own products, gets time to develop his own theories about important stuff and using his own tools. That’s basically my dream. Who cares if at the end, his findings have “no substance”, he’s living the (nerd) dream.

[deleted]

Re: An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

#60

Post by limit499karma »

fredgrott wrote: post #16

a better read is the discourse between D Hofstadler and Penrose as it addresses both sides of the argument with actual working theories... 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.

Is this an actual dialogue [link please?] or do you mean the duel between G.E.B. & Emperor's New Mind?
Post reply on HN