[HN Gopher] An approach to the fundamental theory of physics
___________________________________________________________________
An approach to the fundamental theory of physics
Author : shoggouth
Score : 77 points
Date : 2024-07-28 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wolframphysics.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wolframphysics.org)
| shoggouth wrote:
| This is a good introduction to it by Stephen Wolfram himself[0].
|
| [0]: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-
| may-h...
| cloudking wrote:
| Does anyone understand this theory? When I read through it and
| listened to his talk, it sounded like a bunch of different
| ideas stitched together without an underlying explanation.
| sesm wrote:
| It's like string theory - a framework with tons of free
| parameters which will never produce a coherent physical
| theory, but you can always write a paper that contains a
| promise of explaining any observation with the right fine-
| tuning of some parameters (the promise will never be
| fulfilled, of course).
| Certhas wrote:
| It is utterly unlike string theory.
|
| String theory is a very rigid coherent theory. It has
| produced plenty of deep mathematical insights. I personally
| don't believe that it describes our universe, but it is
| possible to calculate its properties.
|
| Wolframs "Theory" is a bunch of relatively conventional
| ideas (by high energy physics theory standards), tied
| together by wishful thinking and speculation. In parts it
| seems almost possible to show that the ideas are actually
| contradictory. It is only saved by being to vague to fail
| coherence checks.
|
| It is, to use the old cliche, not even wrong.
| sesm wrote:
| "Not even wrong" is a title of a book about String Theory
| by Peter Woit.
|
| I've noticed a common tactic in online disinformation
| campaigns: taking a common term associated with critique
| of some concept and spamming it in a different (sometimes
| opposite) context, to break the semantic link.
| Certhas wrote:
| Not even wrong is a quip attributed to Wolfgang Pauli.
| This is where Woit got his blog and book title from:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
| zachf wrote:
| There are exactly zero free parameters in string theory
| [0]. The details of why string phenomenology is hard is a
| difficult subject, but the characterization you've given of
| it is not correct. If you have a proof that string theory
| is not self-consistent, you should publish it, because
| there is no such proof in the scientific literature today.
| (Source: my PhD in physics.)
|
| Unfortunately, there is a ton of misinformation about this
| topic on the web. For example, people love to say that
| string theory predicts anything and everything. But it
| predicts (and rejects) a lot; it's just that all of the
| known predictions happen to fall into the categories of (1)
| predicting things that are very hard for humans to measure
| (behavior of black holes at long time scales, graviton
| scattering, etc) or (2) retrodicting things we already know
| are true (e.g. gravity, Lorentz invariance, etc.). This
| state of things isn't by design of nefarious string
| theorists designing their theory to be untestable, it's
| just cruel fate of what comes out of the math. Hopefully
| someday we can find some other type of prediction, but
| string theory isn't easy.
|
| [0] See e.g. https://indico.cern.ch/event/630393/contributi
| ons/2890113/at...
| andrepd wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that it's a
| mathematical structure so open-ended that you can write most
| relevant mathematics in terms of it (as you can with e.g. set
| theory). And of course, if you can write math you can write
| physics.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Yes. The problem is that you can write _any_ physics in it,
| so you cannot use it to figure out anything about _our_
| universe.
|
| This is a crucial part that many intelligent people somehow
| utterly fail to understand. If you can explain everything
| (including the things that are not true), you can explain
| nothing.
|
| A theory that explains, is a theory that says
| "...therefore, X _can_ happen, but Y _can 't_ happen". Like
| a mathematician who says that 2+2 is 4, but also says that
| 2+2 is _not_ 5. Or a physicist who says "apples fall down
| from the tree, they _don 't_ fall up".
|
| Compare that to a "genius" mathematician or physicist who
| simply says "yes" to everything. Is 2+2=4? Yes. Is 2+2=5?
| Yes. Do apples fall down? Yes. Do apples fall up? Yes. And
| then people on internet are deeply impressed that he can
| _answer everything_. Such an amazing skill! Ask him about
| gravitons, he has a clear answer. Ask him about dark
| matter, he has a clear answer. Ask him about time travel,
| he also has a clear answer. The only problem is that he can
| both write a physics that contains gravitons, _and_ a
| physics that does not contain gravitons. Etc.
|
| Ultimately, we want to know what is real about _our_
| universe. (Or multiverse, or whatever.) A model that says
| "yes" to both the things that are true and the things that
| are false, is useless. After you figure out what is true,
| you get "yeah, my model explains that". Problem is, the
| model explains the opposite just as well.
|
| ...then you take a step back, and remember that "can write
| anything" is simply a different way to say "Turing-
| complete". Yes, if you invent something that is Turing-
| complete, you can simulate a universe in it. Any universe.
| Both the ones that exist, and the ones that don't.
|
| (And the idea of Turing-completeness was discovered a few
| decades before Wolfram was born. So we can't even credit
| him with inventing the concept. He just uses the concept to
| impress people who either never heard about it, or never
| connected the dots.)
| drpossum wrote:
| What makes it "good"?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Well, I can say I made more headway with this than with his
| book on the same topic that I saw at the library. In
| particular, this article seemed to justify the steps toward
| the "ruliad" a little better. Or maybe it's juuuust short
| enough that I didn't lose patience first.
| qnleigh wrote:
| 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
| Certhas wrote:
| I particularly enjoy this classic review. Very informative:
|
| http://www.bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/
| elashri wrote:
| 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/
| sva_ wrote:
| > For Kids: Junior Phyzzie
|
| > One-time $100 donation
|
| This actually had me laugh out loud. I must've been a poor kid
| stouset wrote:
| As if ransomware, money laundering, pump and dump schemes, and
| tax evasion weren't enough, now cryptocurrency can be used to
| support pseudoscience! Will the wonders never cease?
|
| 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.
| K0balt wrote:
| For all the various ills it is sometimes associated with,
| cryptocurrency remains the only frictionless, 100%
| transparent, publicly accessible international monetary and
| payment system.
|
| 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.
| Scarblac wrote:
| > For all the various ills it is sometimes associated with,
| cryptocurrency remains the only frictionless, 100%
| transparent, publicly accessible international monetary and
| payment system.
|
| Its insane energy use, slow speed, high transaction costs,
| and structural inability to have any legal oversight (for
| eg reversing fraudulent payments) amount to a huge amount
| of friction.
|
| And the existence of unknown entities with huge wallets
| that could pump or crash the price of a coin on a whim also
| means its not 100% transparent.
|
| Is it money? I would say no, but opinions on that can
| differ.
| jobtemp wrote:
| That is as exciting as them accepting different fiat
| currencies. Yes I can convert to Yen then donate or just
| donate.
| dang wrote:
| All: please let's not repeat the usual comments about Wolfram
| himself. They were a cliche 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...)
| rdtsc wrote:
| 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.
| Certhas wrote:
| I used to work close to people who were actually somewhat close
| to the stuff contained in the papers. The consensus was that
| there is nothing of substance to engage with.
|
| 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.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Is it just because it hasn't gotten as far as making physical
| predictions yet? To put it charitably it's very abstract, but
| I wonder exactly where the holes are that real physicists
| see.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Physicists won't take a look at a new theory unless the
| person pushing it can demonstrate very good reasons for
| physicists to do so. Generally those have to be quite
| concrete reasons: for example explaining a known phenomenon
| in a much clearer or more intuitive way, or allowing the
| explanation of systems that weren't easy to conceptualise
| of before, etc.
|
| But ultimately it's up to Wolfram to come up with those
| things. I don't think most physicists feel he has done
| that, especially since the standards increase as the idea
| becomes more different to existing physics
| mellosouls wrote:
| A "theory" without predictions is just a bunch of words and
| numbers hanging out together.
| drdeca wrote:
| I've seen it claimed that the project has led to to a way of
| doing a numerical simulation of GR which is, in some cases
| more efficient?
|
| 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?
| Certhas wrote:
| If you have a citation or more information on that, I'd be
| curious. Numerical relativity is outside my area of
| expertise. It doesn't seem likely to me, but I couldn't
| rule it out...
| drdeca wrote:
| I believe this is what I was thinking of :
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07508
|
| The author is Jonathan Gorard, who is one of the people
| associated with "The Wolfram Physics Project", and
| checking the references, it does cite at least one
| document/paper that is part of the "wolfram physics
| project",
|
| But I don't know for sure whether it exactly uses the
| central framework of the project.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Well the problem is that's then essentially people
| involved in the project making claims about the project.
|
| That's obviously not satisfactory as a positive
| _independent_ assessment, which is what this thread is
| calling for.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| (Disclaimer: I have a physics degree but I'm not a practicing
| physicist.)
|
| 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.
| thewanderer1983 wrote:
| > The consensus was that there is nothing of substance to
| engage with.
|
| 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.
| jereees wrote:
| Yes, Jonathan Gorard is a Wolfram Physics alumni
|
| https://x.com/getjonwithit
| mellosouls wrote:
| Unfortunately a quick Google indicated difficulty finding
| clarity on his importance outside his Wolfram association.
|
| 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.
| fredgrott wrote:
| 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.
| dakiol wrote:
| 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.
| ProAm wrote:
| This is actually the first Ive heard about any negativity. Are
| there a couple articles about whats not to like? To be far, I
| only know about his website and some tool, and that he's
| intelligent and good at math (which is likely not enough
| knowledge about that guy), but I always assumed his work was
| geared towards serious researchers and not really meant for
| someone like me (little math and physics).
|
| 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.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| He was a child prodigy and published world-class work on
| quarks, QM, and subatomic particles while he was still a
| teenager. More recently he has been more interested in an
| imaginary world that only exists in his imagination and on
| paper. He's made a lot of discoveries there and insists that
| the _analogy_ between his discoveries and the real world is
| major big brain stuff. He 's still very productive in math
| and computer science, but not in physics.
| ProAm wrote:
| Thank you. Thats not as bad as I thought it was going to be
| based on the comments.
| aj7 wrote:
| The challenge, for historians of science, is to segregate
| Wolfram's genuine accomplishments, which are
| considerable, from this stuff.
| amelius wrote:
| He's one of the few people who were able to turn scientific
| software into a profitable business. That's quite an
| achievement.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| You might also like meeting Chuck Moore, inventor (or as he
| says, "discoverer") of Forth. He has done pretty much the same
| thing. It's a great way to be if you buy into the Forth vision,
| but for most of us, Forth has too many shortcomings. Roger Levy
| on Usenet:
|
| > 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.
| leephillips wrote:
| 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.
| mathinaly wrote:
| The paradigm he's using is too open ended. In quantum mechanics
| the mathematics is based on Hilbert spaces and unitary
| evolutions of state vectors. You might ask why this is the case
| and it is because of conservation principles. Unitary evolution
| preserves "information" in the state vector throughout its
| physical evolution. This is not the case for Wolfram's
| theories. There are no conservation principles in cellular
| automata other than explicitly forcing the evolution of the
| automaton to actually preserve the relevant information. More
| generally, most computational theories of physics are much too
| lax about the relevant conservation principles and that is why
| his theory does not predict anything. Turing machines
| specifically are not required to preserve anything about the
| initial state and so information can be destroyed and created
| ex nihilo, violating the main principle of physics which
| requires that all matter and energy be conserved. The equations
| have to balance out at the beginning and the end, whatever you
| start with can not be greater or less than what you end with
| (at least in physics).
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| >. Turing machines specifically are not required to preserve
| anything about the initial state and so information can be
| destroyed and created ex nihilo, violating the main principle
| of physics which requires that all matter and energy be
| conserved. The equations have to balance out at the beginning
| and the end, whatever you start with can not be greater or
| less than what you end with (at least in physics).
|
| 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?
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| I think something like this. Imagine a computer with two
| memory cells x and y, and a program that maintains the
| invariant x+y=5. That is information about the program and
| about the state of the machine: if x=2 then y=3, if x=20
| then y=-15, etc.
|
| Now replace that program with an arbitrary Turing machine
| that can do pretty much anything with those memory cells,
| like set both of them to zero. You no longer have the
| information encoded in the former invariant. I.e. That
| information has been destroyed.
|
| The machinery of quantum mechanics (the standard kind with
| Hilbert spaces) maintains certain invariants that you can
| compute things from, but Wolfram's stuff can do pretty much
| anything. Thus, same idea.
| meindnoch wrote:
| 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?
| mo_42 wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-28 23:04 UTC)