Could somebody explain to Stephen Wolfram physics is already underway and the normal way to join in is to publish your ideas in appropriate venues and submit them to peer review?
Video links and discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/g0ioxq/if_it_is_...
- He omits that this study was from 2000, so quite some time ago. Given that the paper about that has 200+ citations, I would say that it got the eyeballs it deserved. He doesn't offer any recent evidence that indicate that this is still the case today.
- The core claim he makes "all mice are broken" is a hyperbole that a lot of people will tell you is unsubstantiated. He makes it sound like all tests done on mice are flawed because of it.
- "I called them up and they were not able to produce any records that they changed their breeding protocols" doesn't mean that they didn't change them in the 20 years that passed. It just means that they didn't produce them to some random person contacting them.
I'm not as "surprised nobody is breaking this story" as he is.
It isn't hyperbole, if Bret's claims are substantiated. The claims being that most lab mice are from the Jackson lab, that all of their mice have extremely long telomeres compared to wild mice, and that this could have serious implications on the potential harm to humans by some drugs - even while also accounting for the fact that mice are already not a good model of humans and that the same drugs are later tested on humans. (I could elaborate on this, but it's covered thoroughly in the paper and podcast.)
I agree Eric hasn't satisfactorily proved they didn't change the protocols, but if it is the case that all of their mice still have long telomeres, and if all of the other claims are true (most US researchers still using those mice + the other claims), then the claims "most mice used by US researchers are broken" and "most tests done on mice by US researchers are flawed because of it" are likely also true.
I have no idea if the above claims are true, of course, but they should be investigated on their merits.
Bret Weinstein's 2002 paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11909679
The podcast between Eric and Bret Weinstein covering the full story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s
Not sure if you already listened to the podcast, but if you haven't, I'd recommend listening to all of it.
His recent campaign was for his brother who he feels was badly mistreated by a Nobel laureate who he alleges failed to credit him for important related work.
You can hear the latter case on a recent edition of his podcast, The Portal.
I've read a book with this title once, full of formulas. I do not remember who the author was, and the book (or the math in it) did not make sense to me.
It smells like bullshit but people seem to gobble it up and call him a genius, for what? He hasn't published, there's no complete explanation it's just endless front-matter for never-completely explained "geometric unity." If you've ever heard of the internet scammer Ty Lopez... that's what this guy sounds like but for physics instead of self-help.
At least Wolfram has something to show.
It seems to me he's just exploring ideas in the open. That's great. I don't see the problem.
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.
Millionaires with connections.
Let's not pretend there is necessarily any more merit to their theories than that of any unconnected obscure crank or even intelligent outsiders.
They aren't getting publicity on the strength of their ideas (even if there is something to them).
At the same time, turning boring results into something fit for publishing can be very time consuming - more than the research itself, and at the opportunity cost of attacking juicier problems.
So if your goal is to utterly revolutionize a field, and you are very confident in your abilities to do so, it’s not the worst strategy in the world to just chase the ideas you’re most excited about and forgo the traditional bureaucratic paths.
I don't think Wolfram's work in the physics space on the cellular automata model has met any of these criteria, so it's not surprising he's not getting mainstrean publication traction. His CA model isn't bringing us novel relationships (yet; I hold out hope here), it isn't making it easier to do what we already do, it hasn't yielded any predictions that existing theories don't also yield, and it's certainly not simpler than field theory and relationship formulae that don't assume a CA. Until there's a breakthrough in one of those three categories that can't be done easily with one of the traditional mechanisms, Wolfram's doing the scientific equivalent of translating lingua franca physics into Klingon; not really wasted effort in that it can be valuable to see something from more than one point of view, but not something that anyone's gonna pay him for or devote their precious column-inches to.
>Note: Since 1987, Stephen Wolfram's intellectual efforts have not primarily been reported in academic articles.
Wolfram's narcissism is so extreme it's just comical. When I was really into complexity science and stuff everyone in the field would joke about it, suggesting a drinking game where you take a shot every time Wolfram refers to how he was a gifted child or started studying math in his teens or single-handedly accomplished some amazing feat. The guy toots his own horn like a circus clown.
It's too bad because he actually does have some very interesting ideas and a good skill at explaining things. His narcissism is self-defeating. He needs to just chill out, write like a normal human being, and publish. Maybe he should take up amateur astronomy. Nothing gives perspective more than carefully observing photons older than the human species with your own eyes.
I sometimes recommend A New Kind of Science with a huge caveat. It's a decent compendium of fascinating cellular automata, complexity, and theoretical CS research with some interesting speculation attached, but (1) Wolfram did not invent all this or do all this work himself, and (2) he takes his speculation too far to the point of flirting with crackpottery. If you can read NKS with those caveats in mind, it's worth at least skimming and taking in the interesting bits.
The problem with the CA-based physics approaches are that while you can create CA models that work and are predictive in ways that mimic conventional mathematical models, so far the approach has failed to produce a compelling model with testable predictions that is unique to the approach.
In other words there's no evidence (yet?) that this approach is better than conventional math, and a strong contrary argument in favor of math can be made from the angle that math maps more clearly to the conceptual space. It's possible to read an equation in terms of the concepts it models, assign units to variables that refer to specific forces or properties, etc. I'm not aware of a way to do that with CA. What you get there are weird rules that manifest something that seems to fit existing mathematical models or concrete observations, but those weird rules are "opaque." It's a relative to the opaqueness problem in AI / machine learning.
Lastly though I would add that the fact that you can create compelling CA models of physics at all does perhaps suggest something about reality. Maybe it suggests that reality is or is similar to a CA system under the hood. The fact that quantum comes from "quanta" and "quantized" suggests that things are in fact discrete at some level.
The problem with these approaches, like trying to write a neural network in MS Excel, is that it's going to be cumbersome, slow, and provide little advantage over more straightforward calculation methods.
When you say conventional math, you’re referring to math that would be quite difficult let’s say for even a dedicated undergraduate math, physics or electrical engineering major. The CA, on the other hand described a process an interested child can comprehend.
As a thought experiment (and a timely tribute) how would you (mathematically) characterize and/or describe an ongoing evolution of an instances of Conway's Game of Life if you didn't have a grid. Or even better, if you didn't have the grid and you could only see things a resolution of neighborhoods of 10-20 cell resolutions? You might be able to come up with some crazy complex math which does it. But if you knew about the grid and the underlying rules it would explain all of the observations perfectly AND more simply.
Don't get me wrong -- I don't think Wolfram has done that, nor do I really hold out hope that it could be true. But it's a real compelling, if only it were.
The notion that there exists a single expression, CA rule, or other fundamental truth at the root of the physical universe is an arbitrary assumption. It may or may not be true. We should go where the evidence leads us.
In the end we should have a model that is no more and no less complex than what is needed to model observed reality.
Also, can't we observe photons older than human species with our naked eyes without taking up amateur astronomy?
What a lame idea, truly worthy of a mandarin.
Eg. American Power and The New Mandarins. (Book)
I think it’s an important and relevant term.
They hate him cause they ain’t him.
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.
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.
As for "one of the most creative dudes of this century", I am puzzled as to how you reach this conclusion.
He certainly seems to be a very bright and capable person, and deserves recognition as the publisher of Mathematica, but that was released last century; what has he created since then that places him so high in your estimation?