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Comment by bostonsre | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone found anything glaringly wrong with his proposals so far? It's all way over my head, but if he honestly believes in his quest and there is nothing overwhelmingly wrong with his assertions, is there much harm in letting him keep going down the path he's on? I could be wrong, but he doesn't seem to be a huckster selling cold fusion-like methodology to get rich. It definitely seems like he could probably express more humility in his statements, but I think people exploring seemingly crazy ideas shouldn't be shouted down or denigrated into giving up that exploration. The world would be a much lamer place and humanity wouldn't be as far as we are now technologically without people exploring out of the box ideas.

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I think people are less concerned about his research, and more about the media machine around his research. It comes off as if he’s puffing up a lot of smoke, in lieu of a flame.

To make a comparison that a lot of people use to justify fringe research, Einstein came up with general relativity mostly by himself, and it was a fringe concept, but it came with a set of predictions that could be verified with observation. Eventually those predictions were tested, and his idea “won”.

Until Wolfram’s ideas come bundled with refutable predictions that deviate from the standard model, it’s a smoke without a fire.

To restate the comparison, Einstein wasn’t writing pamphlets, going on speaking tours, or writing books about his “universal laws” for years before actually presenting the idea in a refutable form.

Einstein waited until he saw flames, to raise the smoke alarm, I’d that makes sense. Wolfram has been raising the smoke alarm for a while, but not providing any images of the fire.

It’s not a very good look, IMO, but reasonable people can disagree.

> Until Wolfram’s ideas come bundled with refutable predictions that deviate from the standard model, it’s a smoke without a fire.

I thought his goal was a sort of parallel reconstruction (to unnecessarily abuse a shady law enforcement term), and so I'm not sure the above captures goals well...?

Disclosure: biochemist and technologist who happens to get a kick out of Wolfram's meanderings.

I think parallel reconstruction is a legitimate and productive goal, if it leads to new predictions or more efficient methods of computing results in the standard model.

So far, I think (please someone correct me if I'm wrong) he's claimed the latter but not the former, and has it as a medium-term goal to claim the former but he is "not there, yet, but close".

I don't know if he's actually produced more efficient methods of computing results, if anybody knows of links, that'd be interesting to read.

I also think that he's heading down an interesting path (parsing the universe as a graph / cellular automata), it's an interesting choice of primitives. It does seem to be a Dual of fields, though, so I don't believe it can give us any more predictive power than modern Field Theory, but I guess we'll see!

Even if it just restates the Standard Model from a completely different starting point, I think it's incredibly interesting.

Also remember it took decades before all of Einstein's 1905 predictions had been commonly accepted.

But some General Relativity predictions which differed from Newtonian gravity where verified fairly quickly (precession of Mercury's perihelion in 1915, deflection of light by the Sun in 1919).

That's still 10 years.

Does than mean we shouldn't judge Wolfram until 2031 at the earliest? I don't know...

It tooke Einstein longer to create a website called Einstein Physics and claimed that what he is doing is a new kind of since altogether.

Oh wait, he never actually did.

I believe that it is known that his basic CA approach is not relativistically correct, but I’m not sure. But (even) more fundamentally, there are plenty of ways to reproduce something that sort of resembles some of the patterns of reality that we already know. It means very little. It’s when something deeper is captured that you can make predictions, and there is nothing like that so far in this approach. In any case, of course he should be left alone to fiddle around all he wants. I don’t think there is any chance, in his case, of criticism cowing him to a degree that he actually changes his mind about the usefulness of his ideas.

The main reason for this "it's all over my head" feeling that one gets when reading his thoughts is that he freely invents new concepts with names like "branchial space" and "multiway hypergraph" and "slicing rurial space" that sound sciency/mathematical and give you the feeling "oh if I only understood math/CS/physics better then I knew what he is talking about" while in reality this is all his own terminology and thus the reader has of course not really a clue of what's going on. It's because he does not clearly define what he is talking about or gives discussions of the properties of the things he throws around, but just "as it turns out there is this beautiful thing I call this-and-that and it's exactly like feynmans path integral" and then we're just supposed to sit in awe. That's not how you communicate scientific progress. It's all just smoke.

Of course one feels inadequate in an article supposedly about fire if all we ever get presented with are different shades of grey smoke and "as it turns out it's beautiful" and "I've researched this smoke since the 80s".

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