Nonetheless, every time I browse through Wolfram Alpha I am thoroughly impressed of what it can do with only Natural Language as an input.
I think, specifically, his vision is very different and radical from other things I've seen, which you'd think would lend itself to at least one currently-testable hypothesis, but I haven't seen one. It seems there may overfitting. He has a way for every major principle in physics to fit into his theory, but no new ones, or flaws in current ones; that's what worries me. I hope he continues working on it. (Unlikely he'll stop after this many decades)
As a comparison, I'm more hopeful for this than String theory, and the latter has been found worthy of physicist's time, so I certainly think this is.
Regarding the crackpot angle: I think that is not an appropriate label: If you look at the people that the label canonically applies to, you will find people who have no idea what they're talking about, who don't understanding the math and physics etc. That is not the case here; he knows it as well as anyone.
As far as I can tell he's not upset by lack of recognition from the scientific community and he puts his ideas out there for criticism so it seems like he's making a valuable contribution. I don't think scientists should be pre-judged on the perceived importance of their work as that leads to group-think and a lack of exploration.
The question "is Stephen Wolfram being taken seriously by the mathematics community?" seems relevant as a question to gauge whether one should spend time reading a very long article.
edit: an even more relevant analogy - is Mochizuki's big ego irrelevant in a discussion about whether his proof of the abc conjecture, that nobody understands and which he refuses to explain properly, is correct?
I've never seen a single of these things being called out.
This is an article about a proof Stephen Wolfram claims to have discovered. Somebody further upthread already mentioned that this may not actually be true, or that the credit at least should be shared.
I've never seen a single of these things being called out.
Happens all the time plus many repetitive things constantly get moderated away by users and moderators. The goal is a less boring messageboard, but it's aspirational rather than perfectly achievable.
Edit: Ok, fine, let's do analogies. Imagine Elon Musk started writing long, interesting, researched articles about some topic, say, Chinese history. If every such article got flooded with discussions about who does and does not like Elon Musk and by how much, those would start getting modbleatings too. This is what happened except it wasn't Elon Musk but Stephen Wolfram and it wasn't Chinese History and it started about a decade ago (as you can see from the comment dates).
I'm not claiming that Stephen Wolfram is an idiot or that nothing he writes is of value, but his ego clearly does influence his judgement so it makes no sense to me to claim that it is off-topic (in the way that, say, his love life or his opinion on abortion would be).
Also this:
> Happens all the time plus many repetitive things constantly get moderated away by users and moderators. The goal is a less boring messageboard, but it's aspirational rather than perfectly achievable.
No sorry, I've been on HN during the pandemic and I was this close to quitting it forever. These things do not get called out in any consistent fashion for many topics. I'm pretty sure a message board for people interested in technology can handle a couple of "Wolfram sucks" comments a year better than literally hundreds of angry rants about a health advisor that doesn't even have any relevance to anyone who isn't from the US.
It's not about the reason, it's about the repetitiveness. The boringness of the repetitiveness is one of the organizing principles of HN. Also, people don't actually 'keep calling out' this stuff - these moderator interventions, specifically in the Wolfram case, have been surprisingly effective. Many Wolfram-y articles have neither moderation intervention or bad tangents.
These things do not get called out in any consistent fashion for many topics.
You don't see everything, neither do other forum participants, including the moderators. The fact that, collectively, some boring and repetitive stuff is missed doesn't imply we can all use more boring, repetitive stuff.
The stuff that I mentioned was really hard to miss.
The question OP asked was, essentially, "is Stephen Wolfram actively contributing to the mathematical community?". If you really think that this is off-topic then... I don't know what to say.
A few years ago Sean Carroll was hosting him on his podcast. It was a bit surprising to me because Sean would never give a crackpot the time of the day, and Wolfram is borderline in crackpot territory IMHO, but not quite. He hasn't published anything meaningful in a scientific journal in a long time as far as I know.
* Ref: https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/ The podcast with Sean Carroll that parent mentioned is also a surprisingly accessible lay introduction, definitely worth a listen.
Like all the stuff about Rule 30 that he writes _endlessly_ about is both true and about 1/100th as interesting as he evidently thinks it is.
A lot of mathematics is about exploration. You look at some system and try to figure out how it works. If you have a good idea (conjecture), you try proving or disproving it. The goal is to gain some understanding.
Once in a while, it turns out that exploration hits the gold ore in the mine. You get something that applies to solving some problem we've had for years. As an example, algebra was considered meaningless for years. Then cryptography came along.
There are other good examples. Reed-Solomon coding relies on a basis of finite fields.
The problem is we don't really know when we'll strike gold in many cases. So people go exploring. It also involves humans, and they can disagree on a lot of things. Stephen seems to run into disagreements more often than the average researcher, at least historically.
It's like rewriting (and clarifying things here or there, putting in new analogies, etc.. not just translating) everything in Klingon, and creating new Klingon words while he is doing that.
Sure this is "interesting" in academic sense. Good luck finding a journal accept paper written in Klingon.