Haven’t read this yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
13 thoughts on “A New Fundamental Theory Of Physics”
” Everything just started falling into place. All those things I’d known about in physics for nearly 50 years…”
Uh-huh. You know what’s going to happen, right? This guy is going to succumb to age and some largely fictional virus and nobody will understand his work well enough to prove or disprove it. Not saying I want him to die, of course. I wish him long life and every success. It just seems like the sort of curve-ball history delights in throwing at us.
He hasn’t been working alone.
Do you remember the Chaos Theory craze of the last century? This sounds like a technique that may offer insights towards experiments. A Theory is something else entirely.
Well, if (unlike string theory) we have something that actually allows us to do experiments, that’s a step forward.
Oof. I have a bachelor’s in Math/Computer science and I understand maybe 40% of his layman’s summary there. If I had to guess this is like string theory, a beautiful mathematical system for generating physics theories that never makes any testable predictions. YMMV.
If I had to guess this is like string theory, a beautiful mathematical system for generating physics theories that never makes any testable predictions.
From a quick scan of this, that is not what Wolfram is proposing. In fact just the opposite. He claims he can evolve models with experimental (i.e. testable) consequence, in areas heretofore unexpected. I guess we’ll find out.
But now it’s looking like the idea of space being discrete is actually crucial to getting a fundamental theory of physics.
This is a fascinating observation. Possibly game changing.
It’s the Matrix. We’re a sentient computer virus on some higher intelligence’s Nvidia card, that got generated by accident deep in a machine learning model. Wolfram’s meddling will unleash CoronEbola-21 to finish us off for good.
Thought Planck constant/quantization is/has been considered actually a hint to this possibility of discreetness of space. Though often gets beaten back with discreetness of space would violate Lorentz symmetry and other holy books of science.
Reading over half of the article certainly seems like the old adage “To a man with a hammer everything looks like nail”. A computer scientist reduces the universe to Graph Theory and discreetness. He try to fit various popular theories to his model, but haven’t really seen him propose something unique/insightful that is falsifiable? Though that may be in the more technical minutiae. Besides the discreteness of space and most experimental evidence points to continuous.
This isn’t the first time Wolfram has announced that he’s made a major breakthrough. Think back to 2002, when he published a door-stopping tome entitled A New Kind of Science. I can’t help but think that a bit of healthy skepticism may be in order.
Probably my misunderstanding, but it does remind me of the old joke about the infinite number of monkeys with typewriters eventually resulting in one producing the complete works of Shakespeare – however, in this case, they intend to declare that the successful monkey is actually William Shakespeare 🙂
But even with everything that’s been done—and it’s very impressive—we still, after all this time, don’t have a truly fundamental theory of physics.
I will spend some time with Wolfram’s latest to see if it makes as much sense.
A rather long read but interesting.
It looks as though what he is trying to find is a fundamental model of the universe rather than a fundamental theory of physics.
Saying that a repeating rule can represent the universe is different from saying it is the universe. If it is the universe than what is the rule running on? I’m not sure this answers much but it could help us to learn more about how the universe works.
As always with Stephan Wolfram, his ideas are big and interesting.
” Everything just started falling into place. All those things I’d known about in physics for nearly 50 years…”
Uh-huh. You know what’s going to happen, right? This guy is going to succumb to age and some largely fictional virus and nobody will understand his work well enough to prove or disprove it. Not saying I want him to die, of course. I wish him long life and every success. It just seems like the sort of curve-ball history delights in throwing at us.
He hasn’t been working alone.
Do you remember the Chaos Theory craze of the last century? This sounds like a technique that may offer insights towards experiments. A Theory is something else entirely.
Well, if (unlike string theory) we have something that actually allows us to do experiments, that’s a step forward.
Oof. I have a bachelor’s in Math/Computer science and I understand maybe 40% of his layman’s summary there. If I had to guess this is like string theory, a beautiful mathematical system for generating physics theories that never makes any testable predictions. YMMV.
If I had to guess this is like string theory, a beautiful mathematical system for generating physics theories that never makes any testable predictions.
From a quick scan of this, that is not what Wolfram is proposing. In fact just the opposite. He claims he can evolve models with experimental (i.e. testable) consequence, in areas heretofore unexpected. I guess we’ll find out.
But now it’s looking like the idea of space being discrete is actually crucial to getting a fundamental theory of physics.
This is a fascinating observation. Possibly game changing.
It’s the Matrix. We’re a sentient computer virus on some higher intelligence’s Nvidia card, that got generated by accident deep in a machine learning model. Wolfram’s meddling will unleash CoronEbola-21 to finish us off for good.
Thought Planck constant/quantization is/has been considered actually a hint to this possibility of discreetness of space. Though often gets beaten back with discreetness of space would violate Lorentz symmetry and other holy books of science.
Reading over half of the article certainly seems like the old adage “To a man with a hammer everything looks like nail”. A computer scientist reduces the universe to Graph Theory and discreetness. He try to fit various popular theories to his model, but haven’t really seen him propose something unique/insightful that is falsifiable? Though that may be in the more technical minutiae. Besides the discreteness of space and most experimental evidence points to continuous.
Though this quote seems about right,
“After an admittedly brief look at Wolfram’s materials, the prominent physicist Sean Carroll also showed interest, while expressing reservations. “On the one hand, I’m in favor of taking swings at fundamental physics with wildly nonstandard ideas and seeing what happens,” says Carroll, a research professor of physics at Caltech. “Most such efforts will inevitably fail, but the payoff is huge if you hit the target. On the other hand, the standard procedure in the development of such ideas would be to verify that you can recover some simple cases of known physics—the simple harmonic oscillator, the inverse-square law for gravity, the double-slit experiment—before raising hopes for a fundamental theory of everything.” (“Of course we’ve done that,” says Wolfram.)”
This isn’t the first time Wolfram has announced that he’s made a major breakthrough. Think back to 2002, when he published a door-stopping tome entitled A New Kind of Science. I can’t help but think that a bit of healthy skepticism may be in order.
Probably my misunderstanding, but it does remind me of the old joke about the infinite number of monkeys with typewriters eventually resulting in one producing the complete works of Shakespeare – however, in this case, they intend to declare that the successful monkey is actually William Shakespeare 🙂
But even with everything that’s been done—and it’s very impressive—we still, after all this time, don’t have a truly fundamental theory of physics.
There is one, pan theory.
http://www.pantheory.org/Pan-Theory.pdf
I will spend some time with Wolfram’s latest to see if it makes as much sense.
A rather long read but interesting.
It looks as though what he is trying to find is a fundamental model of the universe rather than a fundamental theory of physics.
Saying that a repeating rule can represent the universe is different from saying it is the universe. If it is the universe than what is the rule running on? I’m not sure this answers much but it could help us to learn more about how the universe works.
As always with Stephan Wolfram, his ideas are big and interesting.