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Comment by Ste_Tokyo | Hacker News Reader

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I can imagine you snubbing Hamilton by going all "can the least action principle explain a single phenomenon not already explained by the forces + newton's laws? Thought not. Crank".

I have no idea what worfram's model is about, and I agree that the language he uses to publicise it is kinda twatty. However your insane criterion for what constitutes a theory/formalism worth exploring is clearly guided by your bias against the man.

Does the "Wolfram Model" allow easier analysis of certain physical situations like the Hamiltonian does? Thought not. So what's your point?

That's not the kind of model it is. The standard model is one example of a quantum field theory. You should think of Wolfram's idea as a different formalism (ie. not QFT), not a different example. It so happens that Wolfram's multiway model (allegedly, I can't evaluate it fairly for myself) also contains GR as a low-energy limit.

It's like inventing a new operating system (we currently have 3ish, Newtonian, Quantum, and GR) instead of writing a new program (baseball, orbital motion, chemistry, gravitational waves, etc.) Perhaps new programs can be written on this new OS that couldn't be written before. If known programs cannot run on this new OS then it is defective.

>If known programs cannot run on this new OS then it is defective.

I understand the problem is that, like String Theory, this framework has a practically unlimited supply of variables that can simply be tuned to fit existing experiments, while not offering any way to be tested.

Indeed! But it is beneficial to have additional formalisms; it gives you hints about what kind of modifications to 'normal' physics might be possible.

Of course it contains GR as a low-energy limit. Where it can be physically checked, it is equivalent to the existing successful theory; where it makes new predictions, it can't be checked and so is almost certainly wrong. To make progress in physics you need to apply yourself to a real open problem (like "Dark Matter") or get new data (from quantum computers or primordial gravitational waves, maybe). The only good thing that can be said about Wolfram is that he is not paid with my taxes, because plenty of cranks in physics are.

I’m sure it can fit basically any phenomenon, including an elephant wiggling its trunk. I too would like to see some actual predictions coming out of the model, but either way, I don’t begrudge him the effort. I’d like to believe what underlies our reality is more elegant than the high level mishmash we currently understand.

As Gorard has long been at pains to point out (and Wolfram, being preternaturally immodest, has not) the model is a formalism, not a theory.

That said, the point of redescribing things we know very well - like QM and GR - in new ways is ultimately to make testable predictions. So:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLtxXkugd5w

No need for crank. It’s wolfram. Hiding behind some accolades of past, lawsuits and other tangibly criminal offenses. The guy is smart enough To gear projects to ends that avoid crank threshold in the dictionary definition.

It cannot even explain the standard model and/or general relativity either. It's a (hyper)graph rewriting system, that they say can reproduce existing physics with some set of rules and some initial conditions.

Which is tautologically true. Any Turing complete system (e.g. Conway's Game of Life) can reproduce the physical world with large enough memory and enough time.

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