For my part however I don't believe it's possible for the universe to be "pure math" (that is, its reality comes from an equation and nothing else besides it) in the sense that we understand "math". Nevertheless, it might be that there is an equation that can predict everything we experience. We may as well search for it.
It blows my mind. But if you're a genius, might as well have a hobby, right? I'm just glad he took this up instead of bowling.
Just thought I would add that clarification in there, because I know the word "function" has a lot of meanings to people.
Juergen Schmidhuber lays out an interesting idea that our Universe is just one Turing machine, generated by an enumeration of all Turing machines (generating all possible Universes). http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/everything/html.html
Effectively Wolfram is pruning the search space by looking for the simplest rules that he thinks have a shot of reproducing known physical features of the universe (eg special and general relativity, with a plan for how QM may come about), and then looking within that space for the specific flavor that is our universe. If you actually want to find the model via searching programs, this is the only realistic way to do it.
He's not saying it's definitely a network, he's just saying that he's going to start looking there because it intuitively makes sense. This seems reasonable for a few reasons. First, networks are the most advanced form of organization we currently know of. Second, it potentially provides a very simple explanation for many things, such as gravity. Third, the idea that matter is just really concentrated nothingness is just too cool not to look at. And it sort of makes sense if you believe in zero-point energy, which supposedly both general relativity and quantum mechanics predict (according to the free energy nuts).
/not a theoretical physicist
CA produce complex/unpredictable results[n]
[n] Wolfram, S. NKoS
I think the problem people have with this book is that it was hailed as the second coming before it came out and that SW had been in his basement for the past 5 years discovering CAs that ran the universe.
What it actually turned out to be was a thousand pages of examples/cataloguing CAs and the /suggestion/ that this is how the universe works rather than anything to prove it.
Last I checked most objective scientific writing didn't come with a hype machine attached.
Doesn't look like Wolfram scores very high on Baez's index, although Wolfram does get the 50 point item.
There has been a lot of speculation that the universe is a simulation. If Wolfram manages to ascertain the rules and network that "runs" the universe, then the question becomes whether a universe is a simulation, or just acts like one. Is there a difference between something that has only computational rules and structure and a computer program?