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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

“new model for understanding reality...the meta-rules that undergird not just our Universe, but all possible Universes...”

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?

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You could say the same things about string theory. One could envision an alternate timeline where cellular automata is the darling of academia, and Dr. Steven Ramwolf is the lone iconoclast raving about D-branes.

People do say the exact same thing about string theory. They challenge it to show that it’s science. There may be some experiments in the not too distant future; we’ll see what happens. At least string theory makes some predictions and is relativistically correct.

> makes some predictions and is relativistically correct.

Many of which are obviously wrong. We do not observe 11-dimensional world.

String theory has been around since the late 1960s. To date, has it made a single prediction which was later experimentally found to true? (i.e. aside from "predicting" the existence of particles which were already known to physics)

(Edit: given the large umbrella it encompasses, I suppose you could consider things like AdS/CFT correspondence, where a direct "domain transform" with quantum field theory is proven, to be a useful tool that in some instances furthered QFT. But such results are scant given the enormous amount of brainpower allocated to string theory as a whole.)

No. That’s why I said that people “challenge it to show that it’s science.” Why are you bringing up string theory as if I’m defending it?

I'm just suggesting that Wolfram's "theory" belongs in the same category as string theory. On some level it is probably a useful tool to understand something about science, say, beyond Deepak Chopra-esque woo-woo ("We are all energy, we are all vibrations", etc.) But it's not currently obvious that there's a there there.

I think it’s worse in the sense that I alluded to when I mentioned “relativistically correct.”

> is this any kind of science?

It's the "new kind of science". /s

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