We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
writings.stephenwolfram.com
writings.stephenwolfram.com
He has three long interviews on Lex Fridmans youtube channel! I greatly enjoyed watching those those.
1:[Stephen Wolfram: Cellular Automata, Computation, and Physics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA)
2:[Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t1_ffaFXao)
3: [Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality ](https://youtu.be/4-SGpEInX_c)
“Developing a fundamental theory of physics“ is not something Mr. Wolfram can back up.
It is a shame because Stephen Wolfram is immensely gifted and has already achieved what many of us in the tech world can only dream about. Mathematica, despite all its flaws, is a fantastic piece of software. Wolfram has no need to scream "I've revolutionized physics!" to the four winds. It's tragic to see an exceptional mind descend into madness.
He's also an arrogant asshole and his arrogance has greatly hindered what he's been able to accomplish. After doing a lot of interesting work in the 1970s and 1980s (including creating Mathematica), he's done very little of note since then. His books and writings have had no impact on the physics or scientific community.
An author who sets a piece up like that had better deliver the goods - big time. The author does not. You might expect that "new paradigm" of his to have rocked the scientific world. It hasn't.
The big idea is: "Multicomputation." And despite voluminous writing on the topic it's nothing more than noodling cellular automata in ways that have had no effect whatsoever on chemistry, physics, or biology.
To be charitable, if he had some way to mathematically slide between and combine networks of cellular automata, he might have something, but it would probably just end up reinventing deep learning and neural nets on a slightly different set of primitives.
That's been my impression of Stephen Wolfram and what he does in general. He has some accomplishments but his ego is comically large by comparison with those. Very hard to take him seriously.
I mean, you could at least read a bit about what his Multicomputation stuff is really studying. CA are not being noodled there.
And that's it. It's not very deep, and nobody outside his sphere of influence uses this term for that purpose.
The thing with Stephen Wolfram is that he invents all those terms, uses them as if they are standard terminology in the field (of physics or computer science) while freely mixing them with _actual_ standard terminology. That goes for "branchial graph", "rurial space", "principle of computational equivalence" and also "multicomputation". He is just diving deeper and deeper into his own buzzwordial space.
This discussion between the CEO of NKN and Wolfram is pretty good. [0]
I am not saying it is the most important thing happening in "multicomputation" but I think there's a lot that this approach can lead to when we start talking about using clusters of computers, GPUs, TPUs, cell phones, edge devices, etc in a secure fashion. I think there's something to it, but I am also an idiot and could be very wrong.
[0] https://medium.com/nknetwork/stephen-wolfram-creator-of-nks-...
I don’t mind criticisms of my favorite thinkers. I enjoy watching someone being taken to task in the battle of ideas so to speak, but apparently something about Wolfram just rubs people the wrong way, because they seem to lose the ability to make cogent arguments after reading him. As a simple example of what a healthy discussion could look like: Wolfram didn’t believe black holes were real for the longest time, or at least, had some skepticism about that. One could’ve had a reasonable debate, pointing out where he may have erred (up until he changed his mind). Like a proper scientist does.
But vilifying him for wanting to create a research institute is absurd. I have never seen such petty anger at the idea of doing more scientific research.
He’s done a fantastic job creating a new model for understanding reality, some of which suggest interesting physical structures underlying our Universe. He’s changed my understanding of evolution completely with his insights on computational irreducibility and complexity.
And he’s laying the groundwork for understanding the meta-rules that undergird not just our Universe, but all possible Universes. It’s fantastic stuff.
The great Richard Feynman himself frequently collaborated with Wolfram and talked about Rule 30, the foundational insight that spurred Wolfram to create a New Kind of Science. Calling him delusional or a fraud is Wittengtein’s Ruler in action: It says far more about you than it does about him.
I always click on a Wolfram thread, and occasionally you do get interesting insights and even informed disagreements, but this is just disgraceful to be honest.
There’s true evil in the world. Truly despicable sins. Calibrate your outrage towards that.
If you disagree with Wolfram, read his work, steelman it, and show where it’s wrong in a way worthy of scientific skepticism and empiricism.
Otherwise you’re worse than what you think he is.
Do you know the expression "not even wrong"?
Long story short, I don't see why being "not even wrong" at this phase is some great sin.
I mean, take quantum loop gravity. It might revolutionize, not everything, but quite a bit. Last I checked, it was as the same stage - not mature enough to make actual predictions. But it was touting itself as "there might be something here, and if there is, it could be really important", not as "we hold the secrets to everything".
I guess what I'm looking for is "under promise, over deliver". When you over promise your scientific theory, it stops looking like science and starts looking like marketing. That's... you know what a code smell is? That's a science smell. The more it looks like marketing, the more skeptical I am of it as science.
Who is doing NKS-based research these days?
Also, this is very tenuous, but I see a lot of similarity between Wolfram's automata (not this new work) and Lattice Boltzmann methods. Both have been around since the 70s/80s and it makes me wonder a little about primacy but a lot about where he's gotten to with all this. Very intriguing
Mathematica predates any kind of statement of NKS by over a decade (and SMP nearly a decade before that). Moreover, I don't see any evidence Mathematica is becoming more "NKS-y" over time; it's a usual sort of moribund enterprise tooling, just for a highly selective enterprise. I don't see any real connection, other than some possible post-hoc handwaving.
Coming from the other side, Mathematica's relevance to modern physics seems at a 10-20 year nadir. (E.g. from what I can tell it missed the boat entirely on the data-crunching nature of many modern experiments, and its proprietary nature makes it difficult to integrate into increasingly-complex pipelines.) So if NKS - a theory of physics - is being researched, it's either having little success or it's not related to Mathematica use.
Yeah, NKS clearly came after Mathematica, but I think there's a strong through-line there that goes back to his early work and connects directly to this meta-math stuff he's doing now.
The core language is a pattern matching substitution system, and that's what he eventually distills into his 1d automata and then generalizes to meta-math.
"at the core of Mathematica is the notion of storing collections of rules in which each rule specifies how to transform all pieces of data that are similar enough to match a single Mathematica pattern. And the success of Mathematica provides considerable evidence for the power of this kind of approach." https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p627--human-thinking/
It's been a while since I read NKS but I recall him saying he started playing with automata earlier and getting some of the ideas for NKS then, but then did Wolfram Research/Mathematica for some time while he was noodling. I think that's kinda supported by his timeline:
https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/notes-1-4--timeline/
7,833 repos using Mathematica [1]
363 repos of that containing "physics" [2]
Did find this though. Looks neat!
https://github.com/FeynCalc/feyncalc maintained by: https://github.com/vsht
[1] https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica&type=Repo... [2] https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica+physics&t...
I don't think GitHub will be able to tell you much about how physicists are working one way or another. Physicists in general, and also mathematicians and researching engineers who I suspect make up the bulk of most Mathematica users, don't use GitHub.
From that perspective, overwhelming negative comments are a useful data point.
By the way I wish more people would create research institutes so there would be more free competition and less bureaucracy in research. There are many talented people who could do some useful/interesting research but ~80% of them probably won't manage with all the obstacles on the path to actual research (including the obstacles which effectively filter subjects and other parameters of research to what's trending in Nature).
He was very kind, humble and approachable.
So very much smarter than I'll ever be, yet I never once got the feeling he was looking down on me.
I have listened to hours of him on Lex Fridman and he doesn't come off as egotistical or arrogant in the least.
Do you think it's impossible for him to be a skilled mathematician and delusional?
Do you think smart, successful business owners are incapable of committing fraud?
The interminable negative reactions to anything Wolfram does are boring, but the counter-impulse to "he's done good math, so this can't be a fraud" is outright dangerous.
> But vilifying him for wanting to create a research institute is absurd.
I think many noted plagiarists trying to open a research institute would get a similar response.
Science simply doesn't work like that.
Whether it will prove useful like the above models still remains to be seen, but calling it "not science" seems ahistoric. Let's see if they can evolve the theory to the point where it can make novel predictions. If it never makes one, then the model is not useful. If it makes one but is proven wrong, then at least it will be wrong (rather than "not even wrong"). If it makes one and is proven right, then we will have made a big leap forward in our understanding of the universe.
I'm ok with either of these outcomes, but I don't get why anyone would want this thought experiment stopped before one of them is reached.
But you simply don't just say that you're revolutioning physics, biology, economy and the rest. A truly revolutionary work is deemed revolutionary not by yourself but by the other scientists and the impact on the field.
And Wolfram is not some kind of ermite lost in the middle of Siberia. He knows how that work and he has the credentials and the money to publish where he wants.
So weird for the hackernews audience to hate on this mans idea's so much. Its worth a shot no?
Elon Musk is often hailed a hero for paradigm shifting to reusable rockets and wanting to use this to colonize mars. But try and do a paradigm shift in physics, out of pocket, and the haters come out in droves.
I say let the man have a go at it. We might learn something!
By way of a historical note relevant to the current topic, there was a funny exchange between Wolfram and Feynman recorded in the collection of Feynman's letters edited by his daughter. Wolfram started a letter with "Dear Feynman", I imagine because English public school boys don't use first names that much, and floated the idea of starting a scientific institute. Feynman replied in a letter starting "Dear Wolfram" that Wolfram was unlikely to succeed in any leadership capacity because he regards normal people as "stupid fools", and therefore should stick to academic work. Feynman's daughter added the editorial comment that Feynman was disproved by Wolfram's subsequent entrepreneurial success.
https://www.cantorsparadise.com/richard-feynmans-advice-to-a...
Also worth reading Feyman's recommendation letter at the bottom
> You say you want to create your own environment - but you will not be doing that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in - but you will not be working in this environment - you will be administrating it - and the administration environment is not what you seek - is it? You won't enjoy administrating people because you won't succeed in it.
> You don't understand "ordinary people". To you they are "stupid fools" - so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way.
I've never worked for SW but judging by e.g. the employee comments for WR on Glassdoor^, this seems pretty on-the-nose to me.
^ https://www.cantorsparadise.com/richard-feynmans-advice-to-a...
^ https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Wolfram-Research-Reviews-E...
With a couple of exceptions, none of these people were over 0.1 on Wolfram scale when it comes to physics or even math, but I never got the impression that he thought that any of us were stupid fools.
If anything, he seemed overeager to help us understand and even seemed interested in what we thought.
And no, he doesn't have the social skills to fake this. (He also didn't have any incentive to do so in that context.)
He may be more dismissive of folks who are above 0.7 Wolfram. (He wasn't dismissive of the 0.5 Wolfram I know, even though that person was somewhat dismissive of him.)
Case in point: Yesterday he streamed a "History of Science and Technology Q&A" session. [1] Is it about the history of science and technology? No! It's a sales pitch for his new institute! As if he is the singularity that all of science and technology have culminated in. So obviously when talking about history of science and technology all you need to talk about is cellular automata and Stephen Wolfram's role in it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEMFxPWzVU8
Watch it, it's enlightening.
I dont get why people wanna frame wolfram so badly as a negative arrogant actor.
He is answering viewer questions, his subscriber audience is ofcourse asking certain wolfram physics related questions. Timestamps: 00:00 Start stream 1:49 SW begins talking and introduces Wolfram Institute 22:58 Do you have a sense of the skills that an incoming fellow to the Wolfram Institute will have? What would effective preparation for Institute-type work be? 29:23 What is the emerald functionality that was mentioned for biological/cellular computational explorations? 32:55 and what about around the world overseas and in other countries? 33:05 You get some wonderful things out of pursuing science just for the sake of it. There are pejorative terms for this, like 'fishing trips' and 'stamp collecting', but such pursuits led to PCR technology just because someone was curious about thermophile bacteria 44:53 activity overseas & in other countries in regards to outreach programs in cooperation with education systems...you were mentioning some campaigns you had going on 51:03 Will there be more active development on the computational capabilities of Wolfram Mathematica with the Wolfram Institute? 52:53 British physics is more Geometry guild vs American physics is more Group theory and particle physics Guild 54:08 What is your opinion about experimental mathematics and its relationship with classical "mainstream" mathematics? 1:17:05 I often hear that science needs philosophy to justify it. What are some historical examples of this? 1:32:27 i think in a lot of places in history the role of academic pursuit was that a philosopher's role, but academic pursuit has attained a large amount of "division of labor" 1:34:22 Philosophy and Mathematical logic are starting to overlap more. Tarskis Semantics relates Formal logic to topology just like math and computer langauges 1:36:22 Are there inherently philosophical ideas (i.e. cannot be turned into a scientific one like the question of motion)? Can we distinguish them outright without knowing future scientific development?
He's human. Let him be human. Evaluate his work and the work of others that he promotes on its merit. Let the work be more important than whatever personality flaws he has.
The worst allegation IRL I've heard about him is a tendency to give the impression that he discovered all of this stuff when he did not. He did do a good chunk of brilliant original work in the field but for example A New Kind of Science contains work by dozens of others. He did eventually revise the book to add a ton of citations that were not explicit in the original edition.
In keeping with his writing style, he definitely exaggerates the impact and significance of some of this work. Nevertheless I think there are some incredible insights here. I wouldn't be surprised if this whole field (complexity / emergence / cellular automata / computational physics / informatics) does indeed end up solving a lot of serious issues in physics and other fields.
I'm fond of the umbrella term "informatics" for all of it. There's some thinking around informatics as a branch of physics that studies information qua information.
Yeah, but it's worse than that. It's not just that he uses his employees' work and acts as if it's his. He takes ideas from the physics field, rephrases them in the terminology of his "physics" and then acts as if he came up with this!
Example: In a podcast from last year with Sean Correll, who is one of the people in the world who knows quantum mechanics best, Wolfram gave a short summary of his theories ("our models") and then goes on to describe "branchial space" and "rurial space". In a way as if that's a new discovery and he came up with it and "it turns out" and "I recently realized" and "we've discovered" (with "we" always meaning himself). You can really hear Correll hardly being able to hold it together. This brilliant idea has been around in physics for many decades, one of its flavour being the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which Correll has given very good and accessible popular-science presentations about. It's just nonsense that Wolfram "discovered" this. He not just recycles it but more so in a way that's not helpful.
This all is not just "human". It's disingenuous.
I studied physics in my undergrad, I have a graduate degree in math, I've shipped large features on planet-scale systems. I'm no genius, certainly nowhere close to Dr. Wolfram, but I don't think I'm far from your average HN reader in reading comprehension ability.
I've read 35 paragraphs in a post about founding a research institute and I don't know what was said there that couldn't have been conveyed in two or three paragraphs instead.
It is my default opinion that people who use lot word when few word do trick do so to cover up the fact that they have very little content of actual value. That might not be the case with Wolfram, who has quite a track record, but to me the burden of proof is still on him.
"But now this deflection is not in physical space but in branchial space. The fundamental underlying mathematical structure is the same in both cases. But the interpretation in terms of traditional physics is different. And in what to me is a singularly beautiful result of our models it turns out that what gives the Einstein equations in physical space gives the Feynman path integral in branchial space. Or in other words, quantum mechanics is the same as general relativity, except in branchial space rather than physical space."
Most of this stuff is mind-bending to me the same way statistical quantum mechanics, information theory or higher-dimensional physics are. But I always come away from reading about it with a feeling of "there could be something here, and I'm glad someone is exploring it further"
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/the-wolfram-phys...
Peer review is useful, but let's not pretend it's the only way forward for a theory of everything. It's a very, very modern practice. We did a lot of great physics before it existed.
Nearly everything wolfram does is available to anyone who is interested (including code!).
Not saying that you're necessarily wrong but be careful not to compare apples to oranges: There is a huge difference between fields like math & physics on the one hand and fields like psychology on the other.
But that's only statistical - if you want to quickly screen thousands of research papers and the only signal you have is peer review and maybe citation graph - and doesn't apply to specific papers or the research program of a specific person.
He clearly point to (his) previous work, clearly and repeatedly remembers the reader how amazing is the things he is trying to do, and shameless link (both in text and via hiperlinks) to his own enterprises and current initiatives.
I suppose this is some kind of mental template he uses when writing (think about someone writing a paper: the forma and hidden rules, the necessary and obligatory parts).
Of course I cannot vouch for his science but heck! the man is spending his own money, not trying to sell you anything (other than Mathematica) and has an impressive track record since he was a kid! Let’s give him some space to do his things.
I'm going to borrow this phrase. I always struggle with dismissing BS without being abrasive.
BUT... Wolfram (the man) is very much an outsider when it comes to physics. This started 20 years ago when he published a "A New Kind of Science". It was a lengthy but ultimately not useful exploration of cellular automata (some of the fractal-like graphics were pretty cool at the time, but that's about it). Even that was perfectly fine, a rich guy with a vanity hobby doing some weird but interesting stuff, so what?
But lately he's really doubled down on the "theory of everything" stuff with his "hypergraph" idea. To be honest, it IS a bit cringe-worthy. To call this pursuit "The Fundamental Theory of Physics"... geezus, that takes a level of ego that makes one's mouth drop.
But you know what, it's still fine. It's not like he is applying for grants and competing with other worthwhile science for funding. His "staff" for this endeavor are his paid employees. AFAIK, he has no collaborators in academia (and no, multi-hour Twitch streams where he firehoses PHD level math jargon to the general public DON'T COUNT as collaboration).
Now he wants to launch an institute? Still fine by me as long as the funding it comes out of Wolfram's pocket and doesn't detract from more worthwhile non-vanity research.
Stephen Wolfram hasn’t yet achieved full quack status where it’s best to dismiss him out of hand, but he has been moving in that direction for some time.
In these last couple of years, Wolfram has been talking about a "universe building kit". He posits that universes (including our own universe) and it's time evolution can be described by relatively simple "hypergraph" that modifies itself and that fully describes physical laws including the concepts that would unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. His thinking is that we just have to somehow "find" that hypergraph and we'll know everything all the way back to "t=0".
Not surprisingly, the physics community doesn't seem interested in dropping whatever they're doing and pursuing this. But like I said, it's OK. The only gripe I would have is if he started trying to getting funding from sources which other scientific researchers use now. The concern is that he would just roll out his obscurantist papers and talks and convince people with the purse-strings to fork over money for this idea that COULD HAVE GONE towards more legitimate pursuits. As it is now, high-energy physics already gets what many consider to be "too much" funding and it's been rather fruitful. This hypergraph stuff... meh.
As far as I know, the phrase was coined here: https://acesounderglass.com/2022/02/07/epistemic-legibility/
After reading lots of hsi writings, I noticed one thing which I don't like. It seems like he always tries to belittle other giants (albeit in indirect ways) and project himself as an ultimate intellectual. Even in one of his writing about Feynman, he tried to show that even Feynman sometimed couldn't match his genius. Nevertheless, I still do enjoy his writings.
> And he’s laying the groundwork for understanding the meta-rules that undergird not just our Universe, but all possible Universes. It’s fantastic stuff.
What are you basing this on? This is the key point: so far, he has only vaguely gestured to such a model, built a whole mathematical tower around it, and is now claiming that this is directly applicable in vastly different domains. If this were a random forum poster saying it, it would smell to high heavens of someone who has no idea what they're speaking about noticing vague similarities between domains and hand waving a mathematical framework that would explain those similarities into being. This being Stephen Wolfram, he definitely knows something about those domains, but I still think it's almost impossible for his claims to be right.
At the very best, he has come up with a powerful mathematical abstraction, perhaps akin to Category Theory: something which can be used to model and relate extremely different phenomena, and allow insights from one domain to be used in another; but which typically doesn't in itself create much knowledge directly. Edit: to be clear, this would be an extraordinary achievement in itself. But it wouldn't "revolutionize science".
Otherwise, when you claim your model can be used equally well in the foundations of physics, economics, pure mathematics, evolutionary biology, computer science and chemistry - it's entirely on you to first prove this absolutely extraordinary claim. Making it with a gentle wave of the hand towards the future and then asking for money to get there raises all possible red flags.
We call him delusional cause he has lost all humility. He is utterly convinced that he discovered the underlying mechanism of literally everything from physics to eceonomics. Delusion of grandeur is a well-known psychological condition, and no matter what you think of the science, it's hard to argue that Wolfram doesn't have it.
Why can't he just say: "hey I've got this idea, it's crazy, but you know what? I am going to pursue it and see where it leads, anyone wants to join?" Noone would be annoyed by that.
Whether being delusional affects the way you work, I would tend to think so, but you can think otherwise...
Wolfram’s over the top next level ego, to be sure. But he’s on the side of science and reason, so he’s our ego-maniac.
Humility and the ability to recognise and accept when we're wrong is one of the fundamental characteristics of science. People with big egos are the enemies of science.
Indeed psychoticism was identified by the psychologist Hans Eysenck as one of the traits of genius, including scientific genius. Psychoticism is a package which includes associative thinking, creativity, disagreeableness, lack of empathy, antisocial nature, introversion, coldness, aggression, high self-esteem.
The problem is that most people are afraid of giving offence, of being ostracised by their colleagues and so on, and so they self-censor their original thoughts and never create anything fundamentally new and important.
So it's unsurprising that most of the great scientists in history had very difficult personalities (Faraday may have been an exception). I think the optimal approach is to study and benefit from the work of geniuses but have as little to do with them personally as possible. Leave them alone to their work.
Of course the fact that someone has a difficult personality does not mean he is a great thinker. However science has a mechanism for dealing with that via the publication system, where ideas that are wrong are eventually criticised and ultimately forgotten.
Claude Shannon coined the word bit and fathered Information Theory. But very few know his name, despite his huge influence on our daily lives.
This is a long winded way of saying, written history is probably half right at best.
Ten years ago I watched a pay-per-view boxing match. At the end, the fighter said "I'm not the greatest but I'll fight the greatest".
2 minutes later the local news misquoted him as saying "I am the greatest".
Can you fully expand on the things you say rather than leaving them cryptic? I'm having to guess what point you are making.
This is why unquestioning criticism, judgement, is of no substance.
> There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories. Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.
To me, Wolfram treats science and discovery as a kind of business opportunity while pretending it's for the greater good. Open source, peer review, transparency, etc. all give way to his "strong man" personality.
Not to fall afoul of Wittgenstein's ruler, I think Wolfram got right the principle of Turing Machine Equivalence. The idea that Turing machine completeness is the norm, rather than the exception, is something that I think people at large don't really understand or accept (and which I think is correct and profound). I will point out that there's work to be done here in trying to prove TME for other 1D cellular automata, not just rule 110, to further cement this point in these toy systems.
A fundamental thing that I think Wolfram got wrong is that something fundamentally new needs to supplant scientific discovery and mathematics. Often times discrete systems turn into continuous systems, and vice versa, so throwing out everything and starting over seems counterproductive. I'm in favor of bringing computational tools, both symbolic and numerical, in helping discovery but this is already happening. I also don't understand how this can be done if scientific discovery and tooling isn't democratized in the way that open source focuses on.
I think framing Wolfram solely in terms of his marketing for Mathematica and his ANKoS book is overly reductive but I also think it perverts his research, the way he presents his research and explains a lot of why people can come away with that feeling that he's a con artist.
Not making a comparison in terms of contributions to science. But the same could be said about Newton and a host of other great (mostly) men of history.
One of the most useful emotional filters I've learned to drop is the predisposition against zealous enthusiasm. Automatically dismissing it is as reductive as immediately submitting to it.
I will push back a bit and say that the arrogance of current and past scientists and engineers mostly comes across in dealing with them personally and, for the most part, they try to put their egos to the side to better communicate their ideas. Wolfram puts his ego front and center in his more recent scientific communications (the CA collected papers didn't have this problem, as far as I can remember). It's been a while since I looked at ANKoS but, as I remember, the scientific ideas are intertwined with his editorializing. The editorializing gets in the way of understanding what actual fundamental scientific ideas he's trying to push forward.
Could this be a function of the eras' SNRs? When the principal mode of public and scientific discourse was curated print media and letters, one needed only so much pomp to decide you could deduce something grand about the world, and then upon having deduced it, convince your peers that you had in fact done so. In our modern era, to attract people and funding and attention, something more extreme may be needed. (Very, very loose hypothesis. It's probably just a personality thing.)
Is there any evidence whatsoever that he’s accomplished these things? He’s been at this for decades. Is there any prediction of any natural phenomenon? Did he predict a new elementary particle? Can he predict the flow of water through a pipe? Is there a quantitative connection with anything in the physical world, aside from pretty pictures generated by a computer?
In other words, is this any kind of science?
Many of which are obviously wrong. We do not observe 11-dimensional world.
It's the "new kind of science". /s
There’s true evil in the world. Truly despicable sins. Calibrate your outrage towards that.
Funny how "focus on true evil in the world" doesn't apply to stanning rich weirdos on HN...
Dude and company has done some amazing things.
I rolled my eyes when I saw this link posted with hundreds of comments, ofc not because of Wolfram but because it's been this reaction for 20 years. People demand mediocrity and are furious when they don't get it.* Projection is a real thing.
What's cool about Wolfram is his priority is his work, not peoples' opinions of his work. I know he cares, and sometimes maybe it affects his stance, but he's not letting it stop him from exploring. He's a hero.
*Mediocrity in the outgroup. When ingroup it carries prestige for you by association
Remember that people have different preferences.
Those objecting to Wolfram tend to be those who appreciate a "quiet confidence" style, which lets your work stand for itself rather than needing you to function as its hype man. To such people, Wolfram's general presentation style reads as puffery-covering-mediocrity -- someone who truly had what he claims wouldn't need to spend so much time talking themself up. (Note that the major point made across much of the criticism of his new science here is, approximately, "I'll believe it when I see it".)
Of course, opinions vary. There are others who think that someone who's great should promote themselves as much as their work deserves, and to them Wolfram is perfectly reasonable.
If you want an example of this divide outside of the science field, look at Trump. Depending on your own preferences, and for similar presentational reasons as Wolfram, he either reads as a tough and competent man or as wildly insecure.
People like to let the work stand for itself.. that feels like it's from a cloistered environment where everyone is tenured and respected and get their fair time to present their work and get its due attention. Which is fine and dandy and I'm glad we have that.
There's also people who are not in that environment who sometimes have something important to say and will definitely be ignored if they follow the same rules.
To follow your analogy.. was what Trump had to say actually important? Maybe some of it, but mostly it was all hot air, misleading, demonstrably false and occasionally dangerous. As OP is pointing out, Wolfram is none of those things.
Particularly if it's a topic where you don't have the expertise needed to evaluate what someone says, falling back on presentational heuristics is pretty common. For Wolfram, I'm not a dual-PhD in math and physics, so I think I'm not qualified to really understand his claims. Thus thinking "this person's communication style makes me think of people who're exaggerating their achievements" colors my view of his likely correctness -- not enough to come out and say he's wrong myself (since I don't know), but rather to make me sit back and wait for someone who sounds more trustworthy to validate it.
I do admit it's a difficult situation, because if you do sincerely believe that you've come up with something that'll revolutionize all of science, it's difficult to say that in a humble way. (I feel I could do better at that than Wolfram, though, particularly if we take this article as representative of his style. :D)
To continue the Trump analogy... a lot of the people who believed what he was saying didn't have any deep knowledge of, say, immigration policy; they just heard someone who was giving (to them) "I am a confident and capable person" signals who was saying something was important, and they trusted that in part because of this bias.
We can't read his work, we are years of study away from that point.
All people are going to do is shut up(My preferred option), immediately dismiss it because some other physicist did, or heap praise on it because it's "Far out and groovy and must be good if those dirty no good mainstream people hate it".
And people often aren't that good at shutting their mouths....
The topic of the post is the "Wolfram Institute". I'm happy to see more investment in R&D, period. Good on Wolfram.
I will probably never seek out a job at the Wolfram Institute because I believe the title is true -- there is an abundance of scientific opportunity. Working on Wolfram's agenda would not be the best use of my time, in part because the Wolfram Institute likely won't have the resources or interest to exploit the scientific opportunities about which I'm most excited.
This is less a reflection on Wolfram than on the state of the world. Theoretical Physics of the sort Wolfram was imbued in his early career had its moment half a century ago, but has not produced fruit in a long time. I doubt that will change -- in part because even if all the stated problems were solved... so what? Similarly, computation systems seem to have hit a fevered pitch in the 2010s and are now approaching a plateau.
There are exciting opportunities in the life sciences, in robotics, and in AI. But the Wolfram Institute would be a bad place to work on those things, and in particular likely does not have the funding or expertise to do ground-breaking work in the life sciences.
I'm sure there are many who disagree with me, and I hope they find the Wolfram Institute to be a happy and productive place to do meaningful work.
What do you mean?
I also think "pure software" entering adulthood. The peak might last decades to come, but it's definitely not 1990 or 2010 anymore. CS still has lots of exciting things in the fire, but most of them involve more than "pure software". If that makes sense.
Combined with some bravado and deep technical jargon, the reader is forgivably resentful of the entire experience.
Quote you please elaborate on that? Or perhaps quote a piece of work that refers to your statement? Thank you :)
(Unless the person is relevant to the idea but in most cases this is not true).
Everyone is so eager to pile on. It lowers the quality of the discussion.
(a), (b) or (c) could individually be positive or negative to society. And their net could be positive or negative.
I don't know what these values are for Wolfram's work, but we can definitely make this sort of nuanced analysis.
> So far we’ve basically been incubating the Wolfram Institute within our existing organization, with me effectively footing the bill. But as we launch the full Wolfram Institute we need a larger scale of support, and we’re counting on having a network of people and organizations to provide that.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/28da/6507acf40f892b95ee61a7...
Cellular Automata are, in essence, a type of mathematical function called a “Chaos Map”, aside from the cool name it’s also a WYSIWYG name, a chaos map is a mapping of how a fractal expands or changes across space time.
A great example very germane to this site is the Hacker Glider from Conway’s game of life. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conway%27s_Life) The Glider is a pattern which we can observe within the game, and we can see that it represents a function related to the overall chaotic map of the game itself. In English, Doc! All the patterns the game can make are the chaos map. Studying the individual patterns shows both how they are created and interact with other patterns. Here’s an overlapping example: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200318143635.h...
Within the Chaotic map of slime mold evolution, it’s the loner pattern which informs the other parts of the map.
Let’s bring it all together now. By studying cellular automata, we can observe patterns which correspond to a chaotic map of those patterns. By looking at that, we are able to make deeper inferences about the overall total pattern by knowing that what we observe in a small scale will also exist at n+1 scale. Meaning, when we see the loner slime mold evolve the other parts, it’s reasonable to infer through scale that loner humans may also contribute evolutionary information. We can test that theory, and then either continue to investigate from a positive or negative delta.
The benefit of learning about and using CA isn’t that it’s abstract but rather it creates meaning from the raw chaos of life which we deal with every day.
Practically it can lead to better encryption like I linked above, superior understanding and prediction of weather, and for those who are able to view the patterns of the small as a whole: it can reveal truths which I would call mathematically spiritual.
Thanks for reading I hope I changed your mind!
My jaw actually dropped in real life when I read this line. It fits so well. Thank you so much for this explanation.
> The digital images can be converted to binary data and encrypted with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). However, the high correlation between adjacent pixels may still be kept after encrypting a digital image without considering the property of digital images.
What do you mean by this? It sounds like it’s suggesting that, e.g., the AES-CBC ciphertext of an image has detectable internal correlations. In other words, AES is completely broken as a cipher. Surely I’m misinterpreting the claim here.
But I don’t think the same is true of the other AES cipher modes.
In this particular paper:
1. The motivation for "image encryption" is completely wrong, as you pointed out.
2. There is no secret key. The "key" is produced by hashing the image with SHA-256.
3. Claim: "No any useful information can be acquired from encrypted images". Actually: since this is convergent encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_encryption, "key" derived from SHA-256 of data), encrypting any two equal images will produce the same ciphertext, globally.
4. Finally, the actual "key" can't be more than 64 bits, since SHA-256(image) is then split into two groups of 32-bit words, which are xored together to produce two key values. Thus, this whole "encryption" scheme is limited to 64-bit security (probably even less than that). We don't even have to analyze the whole "chaos" system they invented to conclude that it's insecure.
This is the problem. Maybe it will, but as of yet nobody has figured out a practical application beyond "helping us appreciate nature" (replace nature with any chaotic system).
We are pretty good with weather prediction and getting better all the time. The fundamental problem is the chaotic nature. CA does practically help us in anyway there.
Fractals on the other hand has so many practical applications. Just the other day I was applying factual theory to the prediction of criminal activity.
Maybe all CA needs to do is help us appreciate nature and simple machines.
Why is this a problem? Doing maths purely for its own sake is as valid and useful as painting a picture, or cooking a delicious meal instead of just eating dry bread.
If that's not good enough for you, there are plenty of examples of maths that was considered useless at the time but ended up finding a use years, decades, or centuries later.
Nothing is wrong with this at all. I never wrote nor even implied there was anything wrong with this.
If you had read to the end of my comment you would have seen I wrote:
> Maybe all CA needs to do is help us appreciate nature and simple machines.
So looks like we are in agreement in appreciating the beauty of maths.
Maybe it will one day, and no one is saying it's not an interesting avenue to explore.
But making grandiose claims is not doing science. Making novel falsifiable concrete predictions is science, and Wolfram hasn't made enough of those to justify the extreme self-regard.
> making grandiose claims is not doing science. Making novel falsifiable concrete predictions is science
It seems to me that making grandiose claims is absolutely essential to science every now and then. A good example is when Einstein made the grandiose (and unfalsifiable) claim that the mathematical theory of relativity already worked out by Lorentz and Poincare and whoever was best seen as the denial of the existence of simultaneity etc., a claim which obviously turned out to be very fruitful since it lead to General Relativity.
However (and this is one reason I so strongly argee with the spirit of what you're saying), (a) there isn't room for very much of this stuff, (b) Einstein was much better at it than Wolfram is, and (c) Einstein was listened to because at the same time (ha ha) as he was making grandiose claims he was making unarguably gobsmacking breakthroughs in atomic theory and quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics rapidly gained credibility because once its formalism became established, it was easy to show how classical mechanics came out of it in a limit.
It's a problem because Wolfram named his book A New Kind of Science, not A New Kind of Doing Maths Purely for Its Own Sake.
If Wolfram just went around saying "hey, cellular automata are fun and interesting for their own sake` he wouldn't get the hate he does.
Okay, this follows themes of fractal self-similarity, very interesting stuff. However, the next leap sounds completely unsupported. One reason is that physics often doesn't scale like this (see gravity and why we don't have elephant-sized ants):
> "Meaning, when we see the loner slime mold evolve the other parts, it’s reasonable to infer through scale that loner humans may also contribute evolutionary information."
The cellular automata stuff sounds valid mathematically, though I'm no expert, but the leap to other areas of science? Even the jump to slime mold evolution... I mean, where is the valuable addition? Slime mold evolution doesn't seem to require any cellular automata theory to understand. It's an interesting biological system that has aspects of both independent microbial cellular life as well as multicellular cooperation under stress conditions.
Plus the tedious self-promotion, I've know academics like that, the type who march into every room tooting their own horn and banging their drum. Working for people like that is a big mistake for many reasons. For example, if your results disagree with theirs they'll go overboard trying to sabotage you. Your only possible roles in that situation will be those of loyal sycophant, or, if you don't follow along, excommunicated heretic.
This press release is a bit long, incoherent, and manages an impressive number of buzzwords that I don't normally associate with cellular automata. Can somebody maybe translate this to English, filter out the narcissist self glorification and actually explain what it is this institute is planning to actually do? I bet it's something like cellular automata all the way down.
The ego is annoying and personally I don't think that New Kind of Science is very high in information density (may be my ignorance), but Wolfram definitely has many many great insights to offer if you are able to just ignore the remarks about him being the first in the world that did that 30 years ago in computer science, physics and biology.
He did and keeps doing amazing things that are indeed much ahead of the competition.
This is not a new pattern, I've posted this link before HN but I want to repeat it so many times [1] - we are standing on shoulders of jerks (I do not think Wolfram is a jerk btw, but people clearly have some problem with his way of being)
As much as a cellular automata, and computation in general, fan as I am, and after having read a fair amount of his work... I am still not convinced that Wolfram is not just a rich crack pot.
Reading posts from former employees and plagiarism accusations (look up Matthew Cook) suggests otherwise.
I remember this being discussed on HN before as well, even though the search function is not bringing up anything.
I'd rather be a rich dick than a poor schmuck. Pee into the wind Sir Wolfram, godspeed! Doesn't seem super different to how most grant money is awarded.
So, smarter than the average crackpot. But not "not a crackpot".
I don't really understand the animosity toward Stephen Wolfram on HN - has he done something evil or been super rude to someone? Maybe he has a big ego, but I think that's probably true of a lot of - if not most - of the rich and/or influential people that are discussed on here, whether Bezos, Gates, Jobs, Musk or Stallman. It takes a certain hubris to think you can make a dent in the universe. Why is that if your hubris is to believe you can make a billion dollar startup, HN is all "you go girl!" but if someone wants to do theoretical physics, they really need to check their ego?
I don't know if cellular automata as a foundation of physics will turn out to be a revolution or a dud. I do know that we've been looking for a unified theory of quantum gravity for many decades to no avail. If somebody is motivated to come at the thing from a new perspective, then more power to them. Are they likely to succeed? Of course not, statistically the vast majority of theories don't. But just working to provide new perspectives is a worthwhile goal, and I'm glad he's working on it.
Ok, I'm interested in seeing something like that. If you have a link, I'll take a look--thanks. (If you're thinking of 't Hooft's, then I know about it, but its predictions are in serious conflict with mainstream physics, from what I understand).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110#The_proof_of_universa... https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Turing_machine
And yes, this is a cheap trick. That's the point. "Porting" our current theories to some new, whacky substrate, peeking at the textbooks all the while, is Not Interesting and will not lead to new results.
They are more powerful in the sense that P-time for quantum computers (aka BQP) is hypothesized to be larger than P-time for Turing machines. That is different from every classical model of computation (RAM machines, etc.) that we usually talk about. It's hard to call something a cellular automaton if it has to expand exponentially in size as it evolves. Thus, 't Hooft concretely predicts that if his CA model is right, then quantum computers can't work. Idk whether Wolfram addresses this issue.
Wolfram's new physics is based on "hypergraphs", not quite cellular automata, but the point stand that they are an entirely general framework, and therefore useless for the stated purpose.
I was following links from the OP, and while reading his Wolfram Physics one year update[1] I came across this:
https://www.wolframphysics.org/bulletins/2020/08/a-short-not...
[1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/the-wolfram-phys...
He's super rude to pretty much the entire scientific community, by essentially pretending to have invented cellular automata and ignoring everyone else's contributions - even to the point of suppressing them by wielding the legal axe of copyright law:
The goal should be always to understand and discuss ideas, despite egos. As hard that can be practically, anything else is unproductive and not worth persuing.
His thoughts and theories are something to not ignore, but to follow with the same skepticism as any revolutionary claim should be. That should be irrespective of the author.
But we need to give value to new ideas and have a small dose of optimism, that way we can be open to true innovation and paradigm shifts.
But there is nothing bad that Wolfram's mind is powerful. I doubt anyone here would dare to try to create something as complicated as it's Wolfram service.
Why do you feel the need to dress up your comment to be something more than "you guys are just jealous."? Most of the comments criticizing Wolfram in this comment section discuss A New Kind of Science, cellular automata and hypergraphs but yours has no reference to any of the ideas discussed. Your post fluffs Wolfram to an absurd degree without ever actually providing any specific idea that is revolutionary or great.
>I doubt anyone here would dare to try to create something as complicated as it's Wolfram service.
Complicated is not a virtue.
When I posted my comment, most comments I read then haven't tried to discuss any specific points nor his ideas, and my comment was for those. Most were discrediting the guy just based on his personality.
No matter how big this man's ego are, and I also think it is, he has proven himself a creator so far and to be passionate on those topics. For me, that's enough to not dismiss him as crazy or charlatan, especially so early.
My main point here is not aimed to defend or "fluff" Wolfram – I don't care about him personally. It is only about how our society does not have a healthy culture on receiving new ideas.
Let him and his team pursue his research – if this turns up to be something remarkable, time will show us – and humanity will benefit from it.
I posted "Law of Jante" as I see this happening over and over again. Different contexts, same "boohoo, this person think they're better than us".
>Complicated is not a virtue. That is not correct.
Complicated just means a complex 'something'. If the complexity of 'something' is accidental or not, that is another topic and is not even subject to moral judgment IMO.
Now, to develop complex software in a complex domain over several years, this is something hard and only someone sane can do that. So I'm just optimistic and open to see what his team will output from all this.
Have a great weekend!
Those two features are not mutually exclusive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
Now how does that relate to Stephen Wolfram?
The name has some prestige, but it would be difficult for "Nicolas Bourbaki" to leverage "his" mathematical fame to accumulate wealth in a way that allows "him" to advocate a particularly fringe theory of, say, virology.
Wolfram, on the other hand, can leverage Mathematica to get rich, and use his riches to continue to push NKS, despite zero (or less) interest from physicists.
On the other hand, academic credit (not merit) will get you much further than money in many cases - and the lack of it (while not lacking merit) is a serious impediment on the progress of many scientific projects.
The difference? Socialism. Wolfram uses his own taxed income to further his goals, while meritless scientists use the broken system of academia and the income from taxes (that should've been used to further real science) to accomplish theirs.
‘Maxwell’s’ equations are a great example. Calculus is also a prime example (d/dx f(x) vs f’(x)). I’m pretty sure Gauss was a fantastic mathematician, but too much is named after him and a lot of recognition taken away from others who greatly contributed.
It’s not a new phenomena. I don’t think it’s great for things to be named after specific people at any point history, but it’s happened before and it’ll continue to happen.
seems history is written by the patent submitters
Are you saying that some of the work attributed to Neumann was not his? Are there any examples?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_t...
The book "Pioneer Programmer" by ENIAC programmer Jean Jennings Bartik goes into detail about the egos at play in taking credit for the work done by Eckert & Mauchly.
My opinion is that you obviously don't pay for free and/or open software with money but you do pay with the fatigue of bearing the creators ideological and personal whims. Software requires maintenance and support. It is not a do it once and do it perfectly. Also let's not forget about us the users who constantly attempt to dictate the path the software is heading.
If you can take away the criticism, maintenability and support commitment, you can create Bourbaki-esque softwares. Case in point - GNU utilities like cat, ls, sed etc.
Few scientists seem to agree with him on that, and it hasn't produced any novel results. To borrow an old joke, "His book contains much that is new and much that is interesting. But that which is new is not interesting, and that which is interesting is not new." Nothing seems to have been forthcoming in the decades since it was published.
On the other hand, he produced at least one very important thing in the past, and presumably has gobs of money. So he's welcome to pursue his idea. Most scientists don't think it will pan out, but it's his time and his money to waste. He's trying to recruit people, and I would caution that it's probably a waste of time -- as would people far more qualified than me. Still... it's also their time to spend/waste.
- "What will the Wolfram Institute be like? There’ll be a leadership core, which, yes, I’m signing up to head. But the main meat of the institute will be a collection of researchers and fellows, working on particular, managed projects—together with students at multiple levels from high school to graduate school. We’ll be doing open science, so there’ll be lots of livestreaming and lots of open tools produced. There’ll be lots of working materials and academic papers published, and whenever we manage to make a big step forward our plan is to present it to the world using the immediate and accessible approach to exposition that I’ve developed."
Hopefully it's not just this?new physics thing.
In short, maybe this leads somewhere, who knows, but right now it looks like a massive vanity project. It also looks like it has a good chance to start derailing other people's money from actual research into Wolfram Pet Theories.
Can you link me an example?
"[...] whenever we manage to make a big step forward our plan is to present it to the world using the immediate and accessible approach to exposition that I’ve developed."
His writing style reminds me of those sites that want to sell you information but won't tell you unless you "buy it today for the low price of $19.99(or whatever price)." :)
Respect a closed-source software which you can't easily check and improve, for academic work? No. It's a tool, not an academic achievement.
However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence justified by his successes and track record, he’s created a lot of value for the world.
Funny, I see it as the entire opposite: very extreme insecurity, the need to constantly remind us that, yes, truly, he was there, he pioneered this, it _is_ amazing and awesome and will revolutionize everything, believe me, and it's only second to this other thing, which we must remind you, I invented.
A confident person would strip away the fluff and just get on with the message?
Narcissism more often comes from hidden or repressed insecurity - the opposite of confidence.
We all have insecurities- I’m sure even Mr Wolfram.
But success also leads to confidence. An entrepreneur has to pitch his brand and “wolfram” is his strongest brand.
Would love if someone massively successful explains what that feels like
DISCLAIMER: Views not necessarily my own
I think it would be hard to try to pinpoint a single point in time where "he lost it". Stephen Wolfram grew up as a mathematician/physicist wunderkind, so as it's often the case for people that produced highly praised work early in their life, it's hard to transition to a life with humbleness and where output is received with anything else than praise.
In the past he has made a number of outlandish claims that didn't bear fruit (predictably so), to an extent that one would think that only a delusional person could make them.
E.g. he did a lot of work on cellular automata, and wrote a book titled "A new kind of science", in which he predicted that cellular automata would revolutionize all kinds of natural sciences (hint: that didn't happen). He later made similar claims for Wolfram Alpha revolutionizing search engines, and the Wolfram language revolutionizing programming.
This multi computational idea seems to draw from the double slit experiment where observation collapses the wave function and the multi-probability path history based on the observer. This is saying that computations can be modeled similarly. And this type of model handles non-determinism in general and "threads of time" apparently. Interesting. Ambitious but very interesting.
I read the (original) announcement post, and the visuals are very interesting and full of neat geometric structures but it's so far over my head I haven't a clue what he's talking about.
It's some sort of theory about fundamental structures/relationships that underlie "everything"? How mathematically viable/potentially-legitimate is this?
His work doesn't read like a nutjob to me but I also don't have the credibility to judge.
He claims there was a battle in the university between testable curriculum centered around Algorithms and builder curriculums based around hardware and distributed systems, and says it's a shame that algorithms won out.
[0] Alan Kay : July 2007 : A Conversation with CMU Faculty & Students https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8
... What does this even mean? Steven Wolfram has never achieved a single thing in science or mathematics. Absolutely no one has ever said otherwise, except for Steven Wolfram himself.
I used to think he was a failed scientist who, at least, was good with computers and software, but after seeing the decline in the quality of Mathematica, and the hairbrain schemes he has been leading there instead of improving his core software, it has become clear to me that he wasn't even the one responsible for Mathematica being so great, and whoever it was has now left the company.
Has Mathematica gone down in quality lately?
> We want to use our new paradigm to basically rewrite the foundations of several important fields of science. As with the Physics Project there’ll no doubt be tremendous synergy with existing approaches and the communities around them.
Cellular automatons are going to do all of this?
He may be off putting at times but when he gets in to it he can be very interesting to listen to.
(Constructivist mathematics is a thing, and it is pretty easy to formulate physics in a constructivist framework. Many serious quantum theoreticians do.)
- because if we had those tools we would not call them "compkex nonlinear phenomena".
- maybe, but what makes you think this one is the one?
However in the realm of applied math, linear functions rather uniquely have a set of standard algorithms which work on all classes of linear functions, which make them very, very easy to work with. And any non-linear function can be approximated to whatever level of detail you want just by adding more (linear) parameters. You can try solving your non-linear function slightly more exactly... but why bother?
It's like saying "why don't we have other models of computation besides a Turing machine?" to which the answer is: "we do. but every computation can be represented as a Turing machine, so why bother?"
This isn't perfect but something like, math express things while computation progresses things.
You could argue that a particular mathematical framework is computational but I'm just trying to exemplify a distinction.
I think your intuitions about how math works is an unfortunate side effect of how math is often taught, and not so much reflected in mathematics itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...
I find it interesting. He has a lot to prove but good on him for trying to make progress. Who knows what this could lead to.
Because nobody has seen any prediction of any physical phenomenon based on this work.
"Why are you so filled with hatred toward Dr. X?"
Wait, what? I thought you wanted to talk about physics.
DNNs faced and still face enormous criticism from statisticians, mathematicians and it was only after proof of their utility that academics could no longer ignore them.
Watson and Crick’s one sentence paragraph towards the end of their 1.5-page paper on the structure of DNA, that explained the mechanism of heredity and thus evolution in living things, and won them a Nobel Prize.
These guys didn’t take the opportunity to share the glory with Franklin that they should have, but they sure did render a wonderfully genteel understatement of the import of their work.
From Principia Mathematica, several hundred pages in, after proving that 1+1=2
/jk of cause, but it actually was Jobs who came up with the idea for the name.
But seriously - I think they'd find a common language. Both are set in their ways and these ways are far from each other, but I don't think they'd fight, verbally or not.
He's just running out the back door because of this case...
For those who are turned off by "cerebritiesh" (pronounced the way Taleb fan of Wolfie would, or perhaps Sean Connery if he had the chance to meet the old dog in person)
But who secretly indulge in Nobel laureate fanboyism
Here is a video of 't Hooft talking about cell autos & quanta. I don't understand it but boy am I happy to see properly labelled figures for self-styled adults.
Dutch prof has the homely charm of mashed potatoes which goes well with dreams of Illinois corn fields (near the Wolfie homebase) should you fall asleep
Is this for real, or is this guy a wealthy quack? It just seems like I would have heard more about it if it was real.
Or are we living through a Galileo moment where a genius is laboring outside the established institutions and is closer to the truth than the establishment?
My neo-cortex is just not capable enough to judge these things, but I hope smarter people here can chime in.
BTW for those who read French I suggest: Libérez votre cerveau! by Idriss Aberkane on teaching and developing knowledge.
For some people it's a whole new world that will lead to new findings, for others it seems like they compare it to them having invented a new language and acting busy "translating" everything that was already discovered to this new language and being surprised they can.
Funny how even mathematics and physics can be so subjective when most people can't actually work through the math themselves and only depend on "expert" opinion.
Importantly though, neither I nor anyone commenting on Wolfram's plans and thoughts are engaging in mathematics or physics. If anything, the arguments around are mostly to do with the philosophy or sociology of science - looking at how discoveries have usually worked throughout history and comparing that to Wolframs work. To go into the math, you must have some belief that it is worthwhile to spend your time to do quite difficult work, and most arguments around here are about why his work currently doesn't seem to pass that mark. EDIT: to put a number on how difficult engaging with the actual maths and physics would be, according to the article, the Wolfram Research Project has currently published 700 pages worth of discoveries.
To be honest about my own feelings, when I see him claiming his new model will explain what mathematics is - it makes me think he's only a few years away from claiming it explains the meaning of life and why there is something instead of nothing. Perhaps even squaring the circle and computing the number of angels that fit on the head of a pin...
But I think not.
People are both extremely annoyed by the arrogance of the man and very cautious at criticizing the science he’s doing.
Since Shannon, a computational approach to fundamental physics has been appealing. But the way Wolframs maps his own obsession with cellular automata to anything is suspicious. The claims of breakthrough are also suspicious since I don’t think any if the claims have had a chance to be tested experimentally.
Related to your point, if Wolfram hadn’t had the history he did, would Hacker News general suspicious reaction still be present? And would his status affect our perceptions of validity of the criticism.
Granted, what drew me to this thought was the recent treatment of Eric Weinstein, an occasional podcast collaborator (if hostile) of Stephen Wolfram. I won’t rehash it all here, but a critic of Weinstein who is trained in physics countered him in writing. Then when Weinstein moved onto another area, the critic submitted another arxiv piece attacking his second product (an econ talk given in Chicago).
Now, I don’t think much of Weinstein, but the critic’s second attack created doubt about the motives of his first. Was this a defense of science, or a serial attacker obsessed with Eric Weinstein?
Circling back, I think these issue will inevitably arise when a person is actively self marketing their contribution to science, whatever its quality.
Without Wolfram's history, would he even be mentioned here?
If anything, finite automata are beautiful.
https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/all/
"Note: Since 1987, Stephen Wolfram’s intellectual efforts have not primarily been reported in academic articles."
To be clear - no serious scientist believes that a scholarly output which is composed predominantly of non-peer reviewed publications is a serious or valid output.
Essentially, Wolfram is a glorified blogger who runs a tech company. That's not nothing, but it doesn't make someone a scientific leader.
I think Wolfram is a victim of his own success. His achievements in software have let him avoid the necessary humility in being an academic.
Are we reading the same comments? My impression is that 80%-90% are negative toward him.
There might be a relationship between CAs and DNNs, but if you find it you can be sure that Wolfram will take the credit for it.
He produces enormous, voluminous, prodigious quantities of words, usually built around a very interesting core prompt, that seem to imply that they may point to something that will definitely be significant, using words that certainly carry a suggested context of the scent of sciencemath, and this goes on forever, but goes nowhere.
You can definitely be smarter and see farther and clearer than your critics and your peers, but at the “end of the day” you have to deliver something actionable, a result, a real change.
Where has this occurred?
Damn, that's such a great way of putting it!
Oh thank god, it's not one of "those" institutes.
He’s just a guru now.
Why?
If you google something you get jumbled results. Wolfram either you get it right with some facts back at your query. Or you get nil. You can be confident that it's a fact staring at you. You can cross reference and check it too! that's something google can't do.
Expand your world, try out Wolfram.
Wolfram behooves truth it seems people are afraid of the truth. Hence the comments here.
Being able to do your own research and learn programming. I haven't seen a better documentation for software compared to Wolfram's.
He's beyond time in the future. Wolfram's software was used on the ISS to do some real world calculations to make a course correction. It helped me understand programming and computers. I look forward to wolfram adventures.
Computer literacy can be understood and learned using Wolfram.