Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics | Hacker News Reader

Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics

writings.stephenwolfram.com

41 pointspo26 comments

Oh, I didn’t check the URL first.

“Look, a simple rule made this picture! It looks very complicated. The universe is also very complicated. Therefore I’ve discovered the theory of everything. Look, this one looks like a tree! I am so great. Here is a proof of how great I am, written in my proprietary software.”

Expand that to 10,000 pages and that’s what Wolfram has been up to.

There's a rule on this website against shallow dismissals. Somehow, this rule gets forgotten whenever something by Wolfram gets posted.

It's an interesting theory but how many times can Wolfram say 'predictions are coming' and then not deliver without eventually getting dismissals?

Feynman once said it is trivially easy to create new theories. What's difficult is creating a new theory that is not only consistent with every observation of the world that has come before, but also that makes useful new predictions.

String theory at least makes new predictions like supersymmetry. So far Wolfram has described how GR and QM can be derived from his model but only in a hand-wavy way, he hasn't come up with the 'update rules' that actually produce anything similar to GR/QM. Just as string theory has so many free parameters that some argue it can basically model anything, Wolfram's method arguably has infinitely more free parameters and lacks specificity without concrete information on what the hypergraph's update rules are.

There is a reason why Wolfram gets routinely dismissed: he repeatedly makes bold self-promoting claims backed by algorithms that are in reality pseudo-random number generators. I must admit that I feel sorry for him. His insatiable need for recognition overpowers his otherwise impressive intellect.

Eh, I maintain that A New Kind of Science is pretty interesting, and does contain interesting applications of his melding of complex systems, chaos theory, and finite automata.

I do think this theory begins with very interesting prepositions and analyses.

I agree with those who criticize with his extension of the Ruliad into the Theory of Everything domain, but, as Wolfram will probably agree, these shallow dismissals would fit neatly into one of Kuhn’s cases in an analysis of scientific revolutions, if this was one.

It seems like the issue people have is with his connecting his abstract work to the physical world, as well as lack of predictions. I agree that these are the pressure point, but man, I’ve really found some of his stuff interesting. I recommend his tome, in fact. I’ve been reading it over the course of a couple years.

If it isn’t falsifiable it isn’t science. I read enough of the book to realise that it isn’t what it claims to be.

Fair enough then

That loosely characterizes my reaction to his "New Science" tomb however many years ago.

Succinctly, I took the celluar automaton stuff to be simulating nonconservative diffusion.

That said, my guess is that the current combinatorial stuff either should not or cannot be so easily dismissed.

I wish somebody on here could write a meaningful summary of this. I refuse to believe that Wolfram is a crank as some commenters seem to imply.

First, I recommend skipping this post and proceeding directly to:

https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/

This post is almost pure unrelenting direct-marketing drivel, minus the call-to-action for your credit card at the end. All tell, no show. Instead of describing his theory, he describes the various exciting contortions that his face went through when he thought of it.

It is very, very hard to tell whether there is anything here. It looks as if he has taken a data structure so basic and flexible that it can represent anything you could ever think of, and then found to nobody's surprise but his own that it can represent all of known physics. Well, some other things that can represent all of known physics include: The alphabet? Math notation? Set Theory?

But I repeat: It is very, very hard to tell whether there is anything here. It is an avalanche of pictures of complicated-looking graphs, and breathless exposition that I fear does radiate crankiness. It appears to be about a million times more complicated than the physics we already have. If it isn't a million times more complicated, then he has done the worst job he could possible do of communicating it.

A relevant question to ask might be: What other leading theoretical physicists consider this a promising line of inquiry?

well at first blush, looks like he re-invented graph rewriting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_rewriting - on cursory examination, he did not seem to mention that what he was doing with term rewriting was in any way equivalent to this very well known material at all. Maybe I missed this .. also, it is known that you can define some turning equivalence properties to such graph representations, for example : https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.09406 - so therefore you could also assume that this model can compute any computable function. And so, hence, it would seem valid to assume that a physics model can run on such a substrate.

but of course, that could occur on any number of such substrates.

turing, not turning :)

Curious, have you read anything of his? > A relevant question to ask might be: What other leading theoretical physicists consider this a promising line of inquiry

Sure, that’s a relevant question. It’s also a very obvious one, so consider answering it yourself. At the same time, Wolfram has always admitted he’s an outsider not so much in a victimized manner, but that (to me) he recognizes he still has work to do before the physicists start trying to integrate his work. There’s many applications of some of his ideas in a great many domains, especially those that can be abstracted by complex systems.

1. Pretty 2. He took quite a while to get around to fractals 3. It looks like he created several universes in which ABBA exists in some form! 4. Wolfram gets high on his own supply

It seems to me he's doing some kind of combinatorial enumeration and using biases to find related patterns in Math and Physics in some kind of iterative bottom up approach?

Yeah, IMHO apart from using combinatorial enumeration, that's how most of progress in physics happens. You start with an idea and see to what it applies. When you search for a theory of everything, you try to apply it to everything you know. If it applies to many different things, you may be on the right track.

Combinatorial enumeration might work. Isn't Deep Learning a spectacular victory of dumb brute force (in the form of Gradient Descent and overparameterisation) over elegant theory? Seemingly if you do a brute-force search to solve a problem, the number of possibilities you need to look through should be overwhelming, but a lot the time this isn't the case.

[Edit] The origin story of DL is also full of shallow dismissals, for perhaps not dissimilar reasons to the ones you're seeing here.

With enough electricity and enough semiconductors, no brute force solution is a dumb one :)

For the one important exception that Deep Learning turned out to be very useful already very early on in the hype boom during the last decade...

Can someone tell me before I read all this if it's a practical joke.

It's a joke, but Stephen Wolfram doesn't realize it.

Can we wait with the nukes for a few months?

I really want to know how the universe works before we go back to sticks and stones.

(2020)

Also the Riemann hypothesis was solved in 2018, so they claim: https://www.businessinsider.com/riemann-hypothesis-solved-by...

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