Comment by dmos62
Someone seems to say something demeaning like that about him whenever he comes up, and I don't really know why. Which is fine, maybe it's a subjective thing. For what it's worth, the few times I read something of his, I loved it.
Someone seems to say something demeaning like that about him whenever he comes up, and I don't really know why. Which is fine, maybe it's a subjective thing. For what it's worth, the few times I read something of his, I loved it.
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.
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.