from Hacker News

An approach to the fundamental theory of physics

by shoggouth on 7/28/24, 6:20 PM with 79 comments

  • by dang on 7/28/24, 8:12 PM

    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...)

  • by rdtsc on 7/28/24, 8:14 PM

    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.

  • by shoggouth on 7/28/24, 6:21 PM

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

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

  • by mo_42 on 7/28/24, 10:45 PM

    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.

  • by dave333 on 7/30/24, 12:48 AM

    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...

  • by meindnoch on 7/28/24, 10:14 PM

    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?

  • by dakiol on 7/28/24, 8:39 PM

    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.

  • by leephillips on 7/28/24, 9:04 PM

    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.

  • by elashri on 7/28/24, 7:50 PM

    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/

  • by fredgrott on 7/28/24, 8:30 PM

    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.

  • by qnleigh on 7/28/24, 7:46 PM

    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