I've read through this very carefully and it's very difficult for me to understand what exactly he thinks is a breakthrough. Generally when we're talking about breakthroughs in physics in theoretical physics we're often talking about a new idea that links previous ideas, or an emergent property from a theory that we can then test. I've read a bit about it, and it seems to boil down to "Model things as a graph and simple set of rules about how that graph changes over time steps", and doing this if you plug in the right stuff you get something you recognise from somewhere else in physics. Which seems both unsurprising, and not a break through? It's like an ML problem, you don't get credit for predicting things that have already happened. Does anyone know where this approach is pushing forward the totality of physics?
He seems to believe that trying to base science in terms of cellular automata will turn up something new and interesting. It hasn't yet, but he sees hints that similar patterns crop up at a wide variety of scales when you frame it the way he does.
Few scientists seem to agree with him on that, and it hasn't produced any novel results. To borrow an old joke, "His book contains much that is new and much that is interesting. But that which is new is not interesting, and that which is interesting is not new." Nothing seems to have been forthcoming in the decades since it was published.
On the other hand, he produced at least one very important thing in the past, and presumably has gobs of money. So he's welcome to pursue his idea. Most scientists don't think it will pan out, but it's his time and his money to waste. He's trying to recruit people, and I would caution that it's probably a waste of time -- as would people far more qualified than me. Still... it's also their time to spend/waste.
