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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

This is not Wolfram's first Theory of Everything.

Wolfram published "New Kind of Science" almost 20 years ago. Scott Aaronson was kind enough to review it: https://scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf So was Juergen Schmidhuber and many others http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html

Wolfram has now moved from CA to Hypergraphs (essentially sets). They are so generic structures that you get anything physics-like from them if you want.

For example, if you visualize hypergraph that you get from normal execution of numerical simulations for relativistic, quantum or general relativity simulations, they would look cool and you might realize that they are connected to physics. Just like Wolfram's pretty pictures. Would execution graph representation explain more than equations and code? I don't think so.

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Yeah

At the same time it misses the point of the natural sciences.

Hypergraphs as described are more like Calculus than Physics. Of course, describing gravity with calculus was a brilliant discovery but you can't just have calculus and say "that's gravity". You need the connection between the two.

I think Wolfram's claims are even more egregious than that.

His model is inherently computational. It would be like saying "here's a computer that can execute things" and then proving that you'd created the Linux kernel or something.

It's not a very surprising claim to say that a particular fact can be represented in a system which can represent anything. Mathematicians (well, most anyways) don't go around claiming they've discovered the secrets of the universe because math _could_ describe it in principle.

I don't think he claimed to find the theory of everything.

I think he's excited because he thinks that in this framework we can just "throw compute" at the problem to enumerate the possible theories of everything, and automatically rule out the ones that don't align with reality.

That sounds like a lot of string theorists, to be honest.

It does.

I've often wondered why they don't get the same vitriol. I think it's mainly because they're still attached to physical formalisms: gauge theories, algebras, known symmetries and conservation laws, etc. It at least has some constraints, even if they're not testable.

Back 20 years ago when Wolfram released A New Kind of Science, my GR teacher said about that book: "Science makes predictions, not press statements." Even Hawking got in a lot of trouble in his later years when he'd announce all those extreme claims and walk them down without ever publishing anything. It really surprises me how much press coverage this guy can get over 2 decades without actually making a theoretically testable prediction.

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