Comment by cjfd
Comment by cjfd 3 days ago
He is basically a crackpot. Any attempt at fundamental physics that doesn't take quantum mechanics into account is.... uhm.... how to put this.... 'questionable'.
Comment by cjfd 3 days ago
He is basically a crackpot. Any attempt at fundamental physics that doesn't take quantum mechanics into account is.... uhm.... how to put this.... 'questionable'.
Wolfram really loves to talk about computational irreducibility.[1]
But I think his articles about Machine Learning are excellent. [2]
[1]https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=%22comp...
[2]https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/category/artificial-inte...
most people in the field believe his research isn't even capable of being wrong
It's a complex issue. He is obviously extremely intelligent and at least a decent business man. If you've never used Wolfram Mathematica before, I implore you to pick up a raspberry pi and play with the educational version. It's nothing short of magical in many ways. I still prefer Python in a lot of ways (least of all with Python being free/open), but Mathematica notebooks are nuts. You can do anything from calculus to charts, geographic visualizations, neural networks, NLP, audio processing, optimization, text processing, time series analysis, matrices, and a bazillion other things with a single command or by chaining them together. It has its warts, but is very polished.
He also did some important early work on cellular automata if iirc.
Then he wrote "A New Kind of Science", which reads like an ego trip and was not received well by the community (it is a massive tome that could have been summarized with a much smaller book). He also tried to claim discoveries from one of his workers due to some NDA shenanigans (or something along these lines iirc). The latter doesn't make him a crank, just a massive egotist, which is a trait nearly all cranks have. Sabine Hossenfelder did a video on him and how he only publishes in his own made up journals and generally doesn't use the process used by all other scientists. I think a lot believe where there is smoke, there is fire. To his credit, she also mentioned that some physicists gave him some critical feedback and he did then go and spend a bunch of time addressing the flaws they found.
Well, one can love playing chess and that is all fine and good and so on but if someone says that chess is the fundamental theory of the universe, how much sense does that make? There might even even be truth in that statement, who could possibly know? All we can be quite certain about is that to actually demonstrate the hypothetical truth of the statement 'chess is the fundamental theory of the universe' some number, presumably larger than 5, of nobel price level of physics discoveries need to take place.
You are making an unscientific criticism.
Wolfram's claim is that Cellukar Automata can provide as good or better mathematical model of the universe than current current theories, by commonly appreciated metrics such as "pasimony of theory" (Occam's Razor). He's not making claims about metaphysical truth.
I think Wolfram might be one of the 1000 smartest people alive and he has accomplished many great things and is very good at math. But it really seems he wants to be thought of in the same was as Newton and Einstein. So he tries to find some new ultra fundamental theory to achieve this. His book A New Kind of Science failed so now he is trying with the Wolfram Physics Project.
I'm not even able to hold a candle to Wolfram intellectually- the guy is a universe away from me in that regard. But: Given a cursory look at his wiki page and Cosma Shalizi's review of his 2002 book on cellular automata [1], I feel fairly comfortable saying that it seems like he fell in the logician's trap of assuming that everything is computable [2]:
>There’s a whole way of thinking about the world using the idea of computation. And it’s very powerful, and fundamental. Maybe even more fundamental than physics can ever be.
>Yes, there is undecidability in mathematics, as we’ve known since Gödel’s theorem. But the mathematics that mathematicians usually work on is basically set up not to run into it. But just being “plucked from the computational universe”, my cellular automata don’t get to avoid it.
I definitely wouldn't call him a crackpot, but he does seem to be spinning in a philosophical rut.
I like his way of thinking (and I would, because I write code for a living), but I can't shake the feeling that his physics hypotheses are flawed and are destined to bear no fruit.
But I guess we'll see, won't we?
[1] http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ [2] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/how-we-got-here-...