Constructor Theory
constructortheory.org
constructortheory.org
From the perspective of a programmer who's watched the industry grow from bare metal assembly to advanced languages like C# and Java, I've noticed a reoccurring pattern. Sometimes, people who can no longer find anything truly unique to capitalize on simply make shit up and throw it against the wall to see if it sticks.
Comparable to Constructor Theory, there was this idea floating around called the Vidic (Virtual Information Domain. Youtube it). This one proposed that there was a massive subspace storage system housing all meta-knowledge about everything in the universe. It's great sci-fi and maybe even coffee table philosophy. But it's terrible science.
99% of all crackpot theories are just that, 1% of the time they are instead paradigm shifts undergoing community backlash. Skepticism is a winning strategy, which is why it is so common, but you can never say for sure unless your crap filters are really precise.
Most of the time, they provide no useful model. When they do, they are demonstrably wrong.
For example, there was a guy who had his "theory of gravity" which failed to produce elliptical orbits (IIRC, non-circular orbits were highly unstable).
Other guy tried to explain fusion by drawing electron orbits (not orbitals) of around a nucleus.
IMO, skepticism is the way to go with new theories.
- No useful model? GTFO.
- Model does not fit a lot of experiments? GTFO.
- Model is more narrow and complex than existing theories? GTFO.
- Model does not have measurable effects with current technology? Well, you have to wait or build it yourself.
- Model fits experiments, had successful predictions before experiments, and explains more/unifies other theories? Good, go grab a cookie^W Nobel Prize.
How do you tell the difference between a crackpot and an out of the box thinker? Sometimes it's obvious (I've squared the circle!), but often times it is ambiguous (probably a crackpot, probably not a genius). In this case, I would argue that it is the latter.
What do you mean by it? There isn't anything particularly new in either of them and there wasn't when they were created either. And many things that were idiomatic and useful in other languages are missing (no Pascal style subtypes for instance which mean that I have to litter my code with contracts).
The kettle example here sought to be whimsicle, but struck me as an expression of the same idea. This constructor thing appears to be a mechanism for compressing lots of different ideas into a single notation, from which you can run equations. If I understand it correctly, then the kettle would be a good kitchen-table analogy for that complex idea. Another would be - consider how much better suited arabic numbers are than Roman for reasoning about equations.
[update] I'm glad for the criticism article - has given context and momentum to create a proof of concept. Using water, kettle and power.