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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
[0]: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
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.
https://brilliantlightpower.com/wp-content/uploads/theory/Th...
https://brilliantlightpower.com/subject-exciting-news-the-gr...
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
> One-time $100 donation
This actually had me laugh out loud. I must've been a poor kid
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.
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.
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.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic...
