
Wolfram On Hunting For Our Universe - Neoryder
http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/my_hobby_hunting_for_our_unive.html
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henning
Wow, he's turning into a crackpot: long, rambling articles with no
introduction or conclusions that have no math or results to speak of, furtive
mentions of how the rest of the physics community can't grasp how brilliant
and far-out his remarkable work is (which could be because he doesn't publish,
doesn't collaborate, doesn't go to conferences, and basically doesn't actually
participate in the research community).

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puppetsock
John Baez has developed an index for quantitatively judging revolutionary
discoveries in physics: <http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html>

Doesn't look like Wolfram scores very high on Baez's index, although Wolfram
does get the 50 point item.

~~~
Kaizyn
He gets the 30 point question #30 too.

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amichail
You might find this review of Wolfram's book interesting:

<http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf>

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jsjenkins168
When the book first came out, I remember there was an air of skepticism
surrounding some of its concepts. Has the view towards the book by the science
community changed much in the years since? I'm not a physicist, but have
always been interested in Wolfram's work out of curiosity from a comp sci
perspective.

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programnature
Some ideas have already become commonplace, others less so. Simple programs as
'language primitive' for modeling was criticised by many, but is now becoming
popular, particularly in biology (see for example
[http://fontana.med.harvard.edu/www/Documents/WF/Papers/signa...](http://fontana.med.harvard.edu/www/Documents/WF/Papers/signaling.causality.pdf))
General ideas like computational irreduciblity and instrinsic randomness are
finding increasingly direct evidence in the physical world
([http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/fruit-flies-have-free-
will-13...](http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/fruit-flies-have-free-
will-13230.html)) In terms of exploring the raw computational universe, lots
of people in architecture and generative design are doing related things now.
Unforunately most people are unaware of the fundamental ideas that underly all
of these threads.

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jey
Why should it be this network thing? He doesn't back up his assertion that the
universe is described by one of these networks.

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>

~~~
programnature
The difference is that Wolfram wants an actual, single correct model in his
hands, whereas Juergen is just talking about hypothetical computations that
theoretically produce our universe as well as all the rest (with no hope of
being discovered by us humans)

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.

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DanielBMarkham
I read NKS. Good book! Especially for math, physics, and programming geeks.

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?

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yters
So if our universe is essentially computational, what are the implications of
Godel's incompleteness theorem? Doesn't this mean there must be an infinite
number of axioms our universe is generated from?

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earthboundkid
If Wolfram is right, our universe would be a mathematical "function" not a
mathematical "system". Godel showed that every system of sufficient complexity
has facts about it that can't be proven. There is no reason to think though
that every function within a complex goes back on itself. x = y, for example,
doesn't loop around no matter how far out you go.

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.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Wolfram's a lot smarter than I am, but I believe he also believes the function
is discrete and not continuous. In fact, he makes the point in NKS that we may
have went off the rails with Newton and the calculus. It may turn out that the
universe is discrete and that our understanding of it as continuous is just an
artifact of not having the computational power to see how discrete functions
can effectively look continuous at a much larger scale (sort of a reverse
proof of the integral)

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.

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inklesspen
<http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/> provides an
interesting read on Wolfram and his "New" "Science".

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kcl
How can this guy STILL be that full of himself even after all the shit he took
for writing A New Kind of Science?

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amichail
The book has quite a few citations:

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=31...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=3139230665686742056)

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kcl
It also had a quite a large marketing campaign behind it.

Last I checked most objective scientific writing didn't come with a hype
machine attached.

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pg
Citations seem a far more reliable positive indicator of quality than hype is
a negative one.

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ivankirigin
People citing work would indicate that work's quality, but the complaint about
"A New Kind Of Science" was weak citations, an indication of poor quality. I
don't know much about the details. Nor do I know how much people have sited
Wolfram's work since.

I think what upsets a lot of people is the attitude. But a bad attitude can
still accompany good work, so I excuse Wolfram for his quirks. That acceptance
is essential when dealing with people who know they are much smarter than the
average person.

While at NYU, I saw Wolfram speak while on his big book tour. There were a few
big brains at the Courant Institute that leveled major criticisms at the book.
Unfortunately, there was another talk about nonlinear PDEs that most of the
critics elected to attend in place of watching Wolfram. Wolfram started the
talk by saying, "well, the important people aren't here to see this, but I
suppose I'll continue anyway".

As one of the hoi polloi, I found the remark amazingly conceited, probably
correct, and a bit charming at the same time.

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daniel-cussen
My brain just got stretch marks.

