An approach to the fundamental theory of physics | Hacker News Reader

An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

wolframphysics.org

95 pointsshoggouth79 comments

All: please let's not repeat the usual comments about Wolfram himself. They were a cliché on HN already a decade ago*, and many years before that on the web at large.

It's a good test for the community whether we can focus on what's new/different/interesting here and resist the temptation to noise.

* (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

Are there any well respect physicists or research groups independent of Wolfram's group who are taking this seriously or collaborating with Wolfram Physics project?

I would expect something like "an here is Max Planck Institute for Physics collaborating with Wolfram Physics research project on ...". Or something of that nature. At least after all these years.

I used to work close to people who were actually somewhat close to the stuff contained in the papers. The consensus was that there is nothing of substance to engage with.

Edit: When the technical papers appeared in 2020, I personally went through them in some detail. Tl;dr there are almost no novel ideas of substance in there.

Specifically I looked at the "launch documents" provided here:

https://wolframphysics.org/technical-documents/

which, to my knowledge, still are the closest we have to a coherent description of what the grand vision is. Unfortunately I didn't keep my detailed notes, but looking specifically at the relativistic paper, it might appear substantial, but that is because large parts of it review well-known basic results in discrete geometry and causal sets. The actual content is described in a hand wavy way, with little in calculations or rigor (and some elementary mistakes, too).

The issue is that everything that goes beyond standard results is essentially wishful thinking or circular. "If my update rules are such that they produce a causal structure that corresponds to that of a 4-dimensional spacetime, then the wolfram model produces a 4-dimensional spacetime!". This would be interesting if there was any way to characterize the update rules that do so. However, there is not. There is simply the implication that since update rules are very general it must surely be possible to find one that does. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the reader.

A prime example is in Section 3.3:

In all that follows, we shall assume one further condition on the hypergraph update rules, beyond mere causal invariance: namely, “asymptotic dimensionality preservation”. Loosely speaking, this means that the dimensionality of the causal graph show converge to some fixed, finite value as the number of updating events grows arbitrarily large.

However, abstractly defining ensembles of causal graphs that actually produce (at least with high likelihood) the causal graphs of low dimensional manifolds is exactly the core of the issue. If you are able to do that, then the standard results of causal set theory get you the rest of the way. This central difficulty is simply "assumed" to be solved. No further discussion is given on what type of update rules would actually be dimensionality preserving, nor is this identified as a key research question, nor is any evidence or heuristic provided that WOlframs approach has anything new to say on this problem.

As far as I recall the quantum mechanics paper was even worse.

Is it just because it hasn't gotten as far as making physical predictions yet? To put it charitably it's very abstract, but I wonder exactly where the holes are that real physicists see.

Physicists won’t take a look at a new theory unless the person pushing it can demonstrate very good reasons for physicists to do so. Generally those have to be quite concrete reasons: for example explaining a known phenomenon in a much clearer or more intuitive way, or allowing the explanation of systems that weren’t easy to conceptualise of before, etc.

But ultimately it’s up to Wolfram to come up with those things. I don’t think most physicists feel he has done that, especially since the standards increase as the idea becomes more different to existing physics

> Physicists won’t take a look at a new theory unless the person pushing it can demonstrate very good reasons for physicists to do so

So why did all the string theories get popular?

FWIW, by my reading string theory is, incredibly, a lot closer to being testable than this thing, which is more like a proposed formalism in which to expess a theory than a theory itself.

Because it did do those things

A "theory" without predictions is just a bunch of words and numbers hanging out together.

> A "theory" without predictions is just a bunch of words and numbers hanging out together.

A famous example in Physics is String Theory. It has been around since at least 1980s and still no definitive way to prove or disprove it.

I’ve seen it claimed that the project has led to to a way of doing a numerical simulation of GR which is, in some cases more efficient?

If true, that still seems like something of merit, even if the project doesn’t give any progress in fundamental understanding of physics?

Maybe, rather than as they hope, being a path towards a theory of everything, it could instead be a path towards a framework for understanding good ways to do numerical simulations that respect causality, while not necessarily doing all of one time coordinate everywhere (in some reference frame) before computing later times anywhere?

If you have a citation or more information on that, I'd be curious. Numerical relativity is outside my area of expertise. It doesn't seem likely to me, but I couldn't rule it out...

I believe this is what I was thinking of : https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07508

The author is Jonathan Gorard, who is one of the people associated with “The Wolfram Physics Project”, and checking the references, it does cite at least one document/paper that is part of the “wolfram physics project”,

But I don’t know for sure whether it exactly uses the central framework of the project.

Well the problem is that's then essentially people involved in the project making claims about the project.

That's obviously not satisfactory as a positive independent assessment, which is what this thread is calling for.

Sure, this was just me saying “I think this was the thing based-on/using it, that was said to work well”, not “here is someone saying it works well”.

The “gravitas” program is open source, so perhaps some external people may have evaluated how useful it is? (Unless it is hard to get running, idk.)

Thank you!

(Disclaimer: I have a physics degree but I’m not a practicing physicist.)

I think the above comment perfectly summarises the situation.

There has been a lot of fanfare but no action coming from Wolfram’s research.

It’s even more disconnected from physical reality than the more abstract mathematical corners of string theory.

The hard part of a TOE is showing how it maps to reality, how the theory constrains what we can measure in future experiments, etc… This is the part that Wolfram keeps skipping over.

I’ve had an interest in theories of everything (TOEs) and I’ve read through hundreds of papers from serious publications to gibberish put out by mentally ill cranks. I’ve developed a checklist to filter out the noise. Wolfram’s theories don’t tick any boxes! Even crazy rants on some personal blog written in random fonts with ten text colors do better.

I remember looking at the hypergraph stuff a while back and thinking "this can't possibly handle the double slit experiment". I looked through the different pages and found no references to it. I shrugged and moved on. A few years later another blog post by one of the members went up saying "of course we can explain the double slit experiment, from the beginning. We left it out of the early posts on purpose so someone else could do it and get some credit, but nobody took us up on it, what a sad world". It went on with some further hand waving that I didn't understand. It all just felt like a sure sign of brokenness.

My key threshold is the three particle generations, e.g.: electrons, muons, and tau particles.

If your TOE doesn’t even mention them, then that’s a bad sign. Any mention at all will have me sitting up straight and putting my reading glasses on.

Wolfram’s theories are so, so far away from this threshold that it’s hard to even explain to non-physicists.

I saw a claim that they had produced GR from their model. Does that count for anything?

No. That's surprisingly easy[1], and the last time I checked they hadn't reproduced anywhere near the full theory of general relativity. They've just found a thing that suggests that it's possible to map things to a curved spacetime manifold. If I remember correctly, they didn't actually show that this was in any way natural or the only possibility.[2]

[1] There is more than one way to model GR or large subsets of it either mathematically or physically. It sounds like a complex theory but in many ways it is actually "minimal" and highly constrained, making it pop out of unrelated things surprisingly easily. For example, crystal defects moving under thermal vibrations of the lattice can model GR! Similarly, variable index of refraction has very GR-like mathematics and can model everything except torsion (I believe, I'm not an expert).

[2] A key thing with such fundamental theories is not just to show that it can do something in physics but that it cannot do anything else.[2b] Without that constraint, any general computational theory like Turing machines "contains physics". So does the space of all computer programs, lambda calculus, etc... Those aren't useful statements, but that's pretty much what Wolfram's theories boil down to. He keeps finding very simple systems that can compute arbitrary things, pointing at them and exclaiming that "Physics is in there... somewhere!"

[2b] E.g.: Four dimensions of spacetime with a +++- or equivalently a ---+ signature, but not anything else such as ++++ or ++-- or five dimensions. Similarly, three generations of particles, not two or more than three. Etc...

> The consensus was that there is nothing of substance to engage with.

The safety boat of scientific consensus is pulled out a lot in today's environment. One should remember that many of our great scientific discoveries had a scientific consensus that it replaced. That boat won't always steer you in the right direction, sometimes you have to read the paper and come to your own conclusion.

What reason do you have to believe that your own conclusion will be better?

The causal set folks are already outsiders that go against the broad consensus of HEP-Th. I grew up scientifically in an environment that was actively challenging mainstream consensus. Sometimes correctly (e.g. low energy susy), sometimes not. If those folk can't find something redeeming in what you do you should stop and listen.

Also, yes scientific consensus at the cutting edge changes over time. That's the nature of science. But I challenge you to find a single example where the consensus was "there is nothing of substance here" and it turned out to be wrong. Not all forms of challenging consensus are equivalent.

At the end of the day though, this is HEP. Itt doesn't matter. Worst that can happen is that you waste your time learning some neat math.

Scientific consensus rarely has a large body of people who truly dived into the research. Most are very busy with their own research and lives. At worst they just repeat views they hear from colleagues they respect, and at best they will do a minor survey. Therefore it's questionable if more than a handful of people truly have any valuable input to that consensus. What you end up with is truth by authority which is antithetical to the scientific method and ethos of scientific inquiry.

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

It just popped up on HN. I suggest giving it a read.

I have a question for you. How many scientists does it take for consensus, that we should determine science is settled? Or is it always open for inquiry?

Yes, Jonathan Gorard is a Wolfram Physics alumni

https://x.com/getjonwithit

Unfortunately a quick Google indicated difficulty finding clarity on his importance outside his Wolfram association.

I think the comment you replied to is asking for groups or individuals of note and independent but working with Wolfram on the merits of his/their research. Your link didn't shed more light I think.

This is a good introduction to it by Stephen Wolfram himself[0].

[0]: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...

Does anyone understand this theory? When I read through it and listened to his talk, it sounded like a bunch of different ideas stitched together without an underlying explanation.

It's like string theory - a framework with tons of free parameters which will never produce a coherent physical theory, but you can always write a paper that contains a promise of explaining any observation with the right fine-tuning of some parameters (the promise will never be fulfilled, of course).

It is utterly unlike string theory.

String theory is a very rigid coherent theory. It has produced plenty of deep mathematical insights. I personally don't believe that it describes our universe, but it is possible to calculate its properties.

Wolframs "Theory" is a bunch of relatively conventional ideas (by high energy physics theory standards), tied together by wishful thinking and speculation. In parts it seems almost possible to show that the ideas are actually contradictory. It is only saved by being to vague to fail coherence checks.

It is, to use the old cliche, not even wrong.

"Not even wrong" is a title of a book about String Theory by Peter Woit.

I've noticed a common tactic in online disinformation campaigns: taking a common term associated with critique of some concept and spamming it in a different (sometimes opposite) context, to break the semantic link.

Not even wrong is a quip attributed to Wolfgang Pauli. This is where Woit got his blog and book title from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

Oof. Lol. If I ever start rambling about They's malfeasance in Their campaigns, may I receive as humble and direct a reply as this, as soon as possible.

There are exactly zero free parameters in string theory [0]. The details of why string phenomenology is hard is a difficult subject, but the characterization you've given of it is not correct. If you have a proof that string theory is not self-consistent, you should publish it, because there is no such proof in the scientific literature today. (Source: my PhD in physics.)

Unfortunately, there is a ton of misinformation about this topic on the web. For example, people love to say that string theory predicts anything and everything. But it predicts (and rejects) a lot; it’s just that all of the known predictions happen to fall into the categories of (1) predicting things that are very hard for humans to measure (behavior of black holes at long time scales, graviton scattering, etc) or (2) retrodicting things we already know are true (e.g. gravity, Lorentz invariance, etc.). This state of things isn’t by design of nefarious string theorists designing their theory to be untestable, it’s just cruel fate of what comes out of the math. Hopefully someday we can find some other type of prediction, but string theory isn’t easy.

[0] See e.g. https://indico.cern.ch/event/630393/contributions/2890113/at...

How is string theory useful?

To whom? To other branches of physics? Look up AdS/CFT. To the general public? Dunno, I guess the pursuit of understanding the universe is its own reward for some.

How is it understanding the universe if it’s not applicable/useful in the general case?

You mean, if string theory does not turn out to describe the universe, how could it be useful? Well, by giving extraordinarily powerful tools for understanding things that are well established to be useful, like quantum field theory. AdS/CFT gives us the only tool we have to analytically understand quantum field theories in the so-called “strong coupling regime”. This is useful for discovering new properties of quantum matter in systems where you would otherwise need simulations. You can think of it intuitively as string theory providing a glue between two descriptions of the quantum matter, like a “type cast” in programming where you start with one kind of object but reinterpret it as another. The thing that is incomprehensible in one representation is simple in the other. This was discovered by studying limits of string theory in interesting geometries.

I thought lots of variants of string theory do predict things inside human means. But they've all failed, leaving only variants that predict things outside of it.

If you have something specific in mind, I’m happy to address it! But I’m not quite sure what you’re referencing.

Isn't SUSY one of them? That's the first thing I can remember

You would probably learn more by listening to Cumrun Vafa [0] than anything I could say. It’s hard to say much about string theory without space time supersymmetry not because it doesn’t exist (we know it does) but because it’s so hard to calculate anything…physicists are very reliant on a few tools, supersymmetry is a big one, and without it it’s really hard to say anything concrete, yet.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yppqz12ngbM&t=654s

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that it's a mathematical structure so open-ended that you can write most relevant mathematics in terms of it (as you can with e.g. set theory). And of course, if you can write math you can write physics.

Yes. The problem is that you can write any physics in it, so you cannot use it to figure out anything about our universe.

This is a crucial part that many intelligent people somehow utterly fail to understand. If you can explain everything (including the things that are not true), you can explain nothing.

A theory that explains, is a theory that says "...therefore, X can happen, but Y can't happen". Like a mathematician who says that 2+2 is 4, but also says that 2+2 is not 5. Or a physicist who says "apples fall down from the tree, they don't fall up".

Compare that to a "genius" mathematician or physicist who simply says "yes" to everything. Is 2+2=4? Yes. Is 2+2=5? Yes. Do apples fall down? Yes. Do apples fall up? Yes. And then people on internet are deeply impressed that he can answer everything. Such an amazing skill! Ask him about gravitons, he has a clear answer. Ask him about dark matter, he has a clear answer. Ask him about time travel, he also has a clear answer. The only problem is that he can both write a physics that contains gravitons, and a physics that does not contain gravitons. Etc.

Ultimately, we want to know what is real about our universe. (Or multiverse, or whatever.) A model that says "yes" to both the things that are true and the things that are false, is useless. After you figure out what is true, you get "yeah, my model explains that". Problem is, the model explains the opposite just as well.

...then you take a step back, and remember that "can write anything" is simply a different way to say "Turing-complete". Yes, if you invent something that is Turing-complete, you can simulate a universe in it. Any universe. Both the ones that exist, and the ones that don't.

(And the idea of Turing-completeness was discovered a few decades before Wolfram was born. So we can't even credit him with inventing the concept. He just uses the concept to impress people who either never heard about it, or never connected the dots.)

The mathematical structure is called a hyper graph, a graph where nodes and edges come from the same set. Sounds weird at first but think about it like little sentences of the form subject predicate object. The word google can be all three places, as in: Google is a company, I googled his name or I work at Google. Here Google and its conjugations is an socio-economic object, but the set can also be the different grades within a geometric algebra where the different kind of reflections can be both operator and operand.

What makes it "good"?

Well, I can say I made more headway with this than with his book on the same topic that I saw at the library. In particular, this article seemed to justify the steps toward the "ruliad" a little better. Or maybe it's juuuust short enough that I didn't lose patience first.

As a computer scientist who got in touch with quite some theoretical computer science, I find Wolfram's approach appealing. I suppose this approach resonates quite well in CS departments as our minds already know about things like fractals, cellular automata, hypergraphs, etc.

What's not so present in CS (at least where I studied) is philosophy of science. Falsifiability and how theories are created and tested is less grounded in my mind than the topics already mentioned. Though, in physics, this is really important.

Last time I checked, his approach was not able to make real predictions about our world. So it's not yet a real theory. Of course, this doesn't mean people should stop working on this. It also took humans a long time to develop the mathematics to describe gravity correctly.

Far more interesting, novel, and deserving of more attention is Mills classical model of the atom as electrons in spinning fluid shell orbitspheres. Lots of predictions first made in the 1990s like accelerating expansion of the universe, dark matter, and energy from hydrogen that is 200 times the energy of burning it.

https://brilliantlightpower.com/wp-content/uploads/theory/Th...

https://brilliantlightpower.com/subject-exciting-news-the-gr...

Oh, this is still a thing?

Last time I checked, their claim was that the universe can be modelled as a sufficiently large hypergraph rewriting system, with some initial state, and some set of rules. Which initial state? Which set of rules? Well, uh... some!

It's like saying that the Universe can be modelled as a Turing machine, with sufficiently large memory. (or a bunch of pebbles: https://xkcd.com/505/)

Are there any new claims from them?

Despite all the negativity towards Wolfram, he’s one of the few out there whom I’m jealous about. He gets to work on his own products, gets time to develop his own theories about important stuff and using his own tools. That’s basically my dream. Who cares if at the end, his findings have “no substance”, he’s living the (nerd) dream.

This is actually the first Ive heard about any negativity. Are there a couple articles about whats not to like? To be far, I only know about his website and some tool, and that he's intelligent and good at math (which is likely not enough knowledge about that guy), but I always assumed his work was geared towards serious researchers and not really meant for someone like me (little math and physics).

I'm not trying to stir the pot or create infighting on HN, just Ive never heard a bad thing about him until I see the comments here.

He was a child prodigy and published world-class work on quarks, QM, and subatomic particles while he was still a teenager. More recently he has been more interested in an imaginary world that only exists in his imagination and on paper. He's made a lot of discoveries there and insists that the analogy between his discoveries and the real world is major big brain stuff. He's still very productive in math and computer science, but not in physics.

Thank you. Thats not as bad as I thought it was going to be based on the comments.

The challenge, for historians of science, is to segregate Wolfram’s genuine accomplishments, which are considerable, from this stuff.

He's one of the few people who were able to turn scientific software into a profitable business. That's quite an achievement.

You might also like meeting Chuck Moore, inventor (or as he says, "discoverer") of Forth. He has done pretty much the same thing. It's a great way to be if you buy into the Forth vision, but for most of us, Forth has too many shortcomings. Roger Levy on Usenet:

> The problem with comparisons with Chuck Moore's philosophy of perfection is that we're trying to do things he has no interest in. We're trying to live in the real world. ... for the time being the rest of the world isn't content to tinker tiny programs into perfection in a cabin in the woods, barely able to articulate their value in a universally cogent way.

In over 20 years since the publication of A New Kind of Science, Wolfram’s approach had not led to a single prediction, neither verified nor falsified, about the natural world. I would very much like to be corrected about this if I’m wrong.

Physicists show that their ideas have substance by solving problems. But Wolfram’s ideas don’t tell us the masses of the elementary particles, the drag of the flow of water through a pipe, or anything else.

This is why the scientific community doesn’t care about this stuff.

The paradigm he's using is too open ended. In quantum mechanics the mathematics is based on Hilbert spaces and unitary evolutions of state vectors. You might ask why this is the case and it is because of conservation principles. Unitary evolution preserves "information" in the state vector throughout its physical evolution. This is not the case for Wolfram's theories. There are no conservation principles in cellular automata other than explicitly forcing the evolution of the automaton to actually preserve the relevant information. More generally, most computational theories of physics are much too lax about the relevant conservation principles and that is why his theory does not predict anything. Turing machines specifically are not required to preserve anything about the initial state and so information can be destroyed and created ex nihilo, violating the main principle of physics which requires that all matter and energy be conserved. The equations have to balance out at the beginning and the end, whatever you start with can not be greater or less than what you end with (at least in physics).

>. Turing machines specifically are not required to preserve anything about the initial state and so information can be destroyed and created ex nihilo, violating the main principle of physics which requires that all matter and energy be conserved. The equations have to balance out at the beginning and the end, whatever you start with can not be greater or less than what you end with (at least in physics).

can you explain this more rigorously? I don't see how computation 'destorys' information, unless you are using "destroy" loosely and you just mean exploding the state space?

I think something like this. Imagine a computer with two memory cells x and y, and a program that maintains the invariant x+y=5. That is information about the program and about the state of the machine: if x=2 then y=3, if x=20 then y=-15, etc.

Now replace that program with an arbitrary Turing machine that can do pretty much anything with those memory cells, like set both of them to zero. You no longer have the information encoded in the former invariant. I.e. That information has been destroyed.

The machinery of quantum mechanics (the standard kind with Hilbert spaces) maintains certain invariants that you can compute things from, but Wolfram's stuff can do pretty much anything. Thus, same idea.

That's a good example and demonstration. The unitary invariance basically requires that the norm of the vector is preserved so that if we start with a unit vector then unitary evolution of that vector will always keep it that way. This is not the case for arbitrary programs because they don't have to preserve any invariants which makes them ill-suited for physical theory building. This is why Wolfram's approach is too open-ended, hypergraph evolution is way too lax of a framework for describing physical reality and conforming to existing experimental results.

I think there is a flaw in your logic here. The physics we know has certain features-e.g. unitary evolution. But, it is possible that there is a “deeper level” of physics we haven’t discovered yet. There are some major proposals for what that “deeper level” (or levels) might look like - e.g. M theory or loop quantum gravity - but for all we know maybe the underlying “real physics” is something nobody has even thought of yet, maybe something completely out of left field whose discovery is centuries away.

Whatever that “deeper level” is, should we assume it shares the “surface level” features such as unitary evolution? Well, there are two possibilities (a) yes it does (absolutely or universally so), or (b) in the most general case, no it doesn’t, but in the normal situation those features emerge.

Suppose, in the “ultimate physics”, unitary evolution is actually violated, but only at very extreme energy levels we are nowhere near being able to test? Or maybe it is conserved locally, but in distant regions of the universe (say a googolplex parsecs away) it isn’t? Or maybe it is conserved in the present, but in the very distant future (say a googolplex years from now) it won’t be any more? Do we have any way of knowing those possibilities won’t turn out to hold?

But if we don’t, then using the fact that cellular automata lack that feature as an argument against Wolfram’s hypothesis - it seems to me rather weak. That’s not to say that his hypothesis is actually true - I’d be rather surprised if it were. But I just don’t think this is a very convincing argument against it

I wasn't providing an argument to convince anyone of anything. Study the mathematics and if you have a way of making progress in constructing better physical theories based on Wolfram's foundations then more power to you. In general, talk is cheap and the proof is in the pudding. Wolfram never provides any testable results of possible experiments to validate his theories. He is mostly theorycrafting with rewrite systems and hoping something useful comes out. It's a lot like an evolutionary search over the space of possible rewrite systems to make some nice looking graphs. Whatever he's doing is not science in any meaningful sense of the word because there are no predictive and falsifiable experiments based on his theories.

so you're saying you can't work backwards at an arbitrary point without the initial IO and that's the problem?

Away from the fact that this is not taken seriously by the physics community. This is the first time we have a chance to use crypto to support a fundamental physics research \s [1]

[1] https://www.wolframphysics.org/membership/

> For Kids: Junior Phyzzie

> One-time $100 donation

This actually had me laugh out loud. I must've been a poor kid

As if ransomware, money laundering, pump and dump schemes, and tax evasion weren’t enough, now cryptocurrency can be used to support pseudoscience! Will the wonders never cease?

Sorry, I know this is a bit snark-heavy for HN but I can’t help but feel impressed by the way cryptocurrency has somehow succeeded in associating itself with so many ills of modern society.

For all the various ills it is sometimes associated with, cryptocurrency remains the only frictionless, 100% transparent, publicly accessible international monetary and payment system.

That seems like something we would want, the ability to freely transfer payment from one individual to another, internationally, contractually, and transparently.

The only interests that I would think would want that gone are those that profit from the many choke points in our financial systems. Sure, speculators and opportunists have leveraged benefits, and they are the ones you always hear about… you don’t hear about the millions of people quietly managing their private and legal financial affairs, because when you use it for that, it just works -exactly as designed.

FWIW I think you can much more easily associate cash with all kinds of shady and socially caustic uses, but for whatever reason not very many cryptocurrency critics are out to abolish cash, which I would think would be the poster child for seedy, shady, toxic commerce.

But, sure, crypto bad and whatever.

> For all the various ills it is sometimes associated with, cryptocurrency remains the only frictionless, 100% transparent, publicly accessible international monetary and payment system.

Its insane energy use, slow speed, high transaction costs, and structural inability to have any legal oversight (for eg reversing fraudulent payments) amount to a huge amount of friction.

And the existence of unknown entities with huge wallets that could pump or crash the price of a coin on a whim also means its not 100% transparent.

Is it money? I would say no, but opinions on that can differ.

There are plenty of cryptocurrencies that do not suffer from insane energy use, slow transactions, or lack of oversight… and governments have not historically been very good about crashing currency valuations, if not on a whim than with a catastrophic plan. There are stablecoins that are verifiably and transparently backed, which is more than I can say for any extant government issued currency.

But sure, there are lousy performers in the space, just as the banking system is a poor performer in energy use and speed for many kinds of transactions.

For example, If you stack up the energy use of financial institutions, many SOTA cryptocurrency systems compare extremely favourably on a per transaction basis.

I think people easily forget that the space is not at all homogeneous, and there are vast differences between different blockchains and tokenisation systems.

Lumping them all together is like saying that all government backed currencies are total crap just because so many currencies have seen catastrophic inflation and counterfeiting in the last century.

Many countries debt backed currency projects are actually fairly stable and well managed.

That is as exciting as them accepting different fiat currencies. Yes I can convert to Yen then donate or just donate.

a better read is the discourse between D Hofstadler and Penrose as it addresses both sides of the argument with actual working theories...

And, yes it takes a while to digest...you have to invest some time in reading both authors series on the subject...but its well worth the read.

Is this an actual dialogue [link please?] or do you mean the duel between G.E.B. & Emperor's New Mind?

Before people get too excited about this, note that Wolfram has been on about his own fundamental theory of everything for some time, and the wider physics community does not take it seriously. His book 'A New Kind of Science' has him taking credit for others' discoveries going back to Turing. Here are two recent critiques of this work:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic...

https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089

I particularly enjoy this classic review. Very informative:

http://www.bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

I think the acknowledgements in your second link are interesting:

> I thank Stephen Wolfram for an enjoyable conversation about this review;

Reply on news.ycombinator.com