Stephen Wolfram’s ideas are under-appreciated
Most of these “ideas” are described and explained in his book “A New Kind of Science” (NKS), available for free on the web:
Here’s a (long) recent post describing the rather extraordinary efforts of writing (and publishing) the book:
One of the main criticisms of the book, that I’ve come across, is that he’s ‘arrogant’ and gave himself credit for other’s discoveries. The above post contains some relevant info about him deliberately deciding to write the book mostly from ‘his perspective’. Charitably, I think that makes his apparent ‘arrogance’ better understood as something like a ‘literary convention’, especially given the plausibility of him having ‘independently re-discovered’ some of the particular results he reports. (The book itself is about half detailed technical notes, tho still not in a ‘proper’ academic citation style. I can kinda understand why academics would hate that, but it’s frustrating, to me, that that seems to reliably overshadow any real effort to engage with the ideas themselves!)
Here’s another recent post describing his ongoing ‘physics project’ that’s grown out of the work he began and covered in NKS:
I don’t have sufficient technical background to really judge the output of this physics work itself but it stills seem (at least) very intriguing!
In particular, this seems very enticing:
Instead of imagining that the universe follows some particular rule—albeit applying it multicomputationally in all possible ways—what if the universe follows all possible rules?
And then we realized: this is something much more general than physics. And in a sense it’s the ultimate computational construct. It’s what one gets if one takes all the programs in the computational universe that I studied in A New Kind of Science and runs them together—as a single, giant, multicomputational system. It’s a single, unique object that I call the ruliad, formed as the entangled limit of all possible computations.
That seems to me to very much ‘rhyme’ with some arguments for ‘many worlds’ quantum physics, e.g. ‘all the branches are real!’.
Is it customary to sue over literary conventions?
Oof – that looks really bad!
I’ve noticed comments about similar things on Andrew Gelman’s blog and now I think I need to actually make a significant update towards ‘something is wrong with Stephen Wolfram’, tho I’m still not sure what the underlying issue is.
Do you have any links about that case (“Wolfram Research Inc v. Cook”) specifically? I’d think it’s possible that there was some reasonable reason for the lawsuit, but overall, on priors, I’d guess it’s just bad (if not terrible).
If you google the case name, you’ll find some discussions of from early on, and Shalizi covered Cook’s lawsuit & other lawsuits in the essay already linked. Unfortunately, most of the discussion has long since linkrotted but I remember at the time it being well known inside the small CA community, and I doubt oldtimers will have forgotten Wolfram’s behavior even if it no longer comes up much.
(Disclosure: I have met Wolfram, and he was enjoyable to talk to, or perhaps I should say, listen to, and I liked the Wolfram I met—but nothing was at stake, and I think I should not like the Wolfram I met in other contexts so much. Perhaps he has mellowed with age.)
I now think it is plausible that Wolfram sued “over literary conventions”:
Wolfram Research v Cook—LessWrong
I suspect that Wolfram just wanted to reveal the relevant proof himself, first, in his book NKS (A New Kind of Science), and that Matthew Cook probably was contractually obligated to allow Wolfram to do that.
Given that the two parties settled, and that Cook published his paper about his proof in Wolfram’s own journal (Complex Systems), two years after NKS was published, seems to mostly confirm my suspicions.
A very enjoyably very critical review of Wolfram’s big heavy book by Cosma Shalizi: “A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity”.
A less entertaining but also very critical review by Scott Aaronson: on arXiv.org. This one, among other things, takes a specific handwavy proposal of Wolfram’s for explaining quantum entanglement and (assuming Aaronson’s got it right, which I would expect him to have) shows that it can’t work.
Maybe I should read the first link too, but I just don’t expect to be able to ‘wade thru’ the vitriol to get at any ‘technical’ criticism.
I’ve read the other paper before and, IIRC, it was great criticism, but not inescapably ‘fatal’. I’ll try to reread it at some point.
There’s no vitirol except in the title. The review is excellent, as are most of that author’s reviews.
His constructs have yet to explain one iota of actual physics. Can he get the spectrum of the hydrogen atom? Can he even get parabolic motion? … If you want an actual physics guru, I suggest reading Feynman and watching Susskind.
I think that’s very uncharitable and not a standard that anyone would apply to, e.g. ‘string theory’ (in any of their forms) or loop quantum gravity.
His whole ‘paradigm’ is also pretty distinct, i.e. ‘computational exploration’. I don’t think I’ve ever read a plausible account of ‘hypothesis/theory generation’ for physics generally, especially for any of the work people are pursuing for various GUTs.
It seems perfectly reasonable to start with ‘oh, look, something like General Relativity’.
I think that’s unfair to string theory. People have constructed string theory universes that reduce to quantum field theory in the domains where quantum field theory is known to apply, and that reduce to general relativity in the domains where general relativity is known to apply, and that offer self-consistent microscopic explanations of things that involve the overlap between QFT & GR, like black hole entropy and Hawking radiation.
I don’t think anyone has yet found a string theory universe with the exact spectrum of particles that are known to exist in our universe; but compare that to the suggestion (elsewhere in the comment thread, I wouldn’t know either way) that Wolfram theories haven’t been demonstrated to be compatible with even the most basic aspects of quantum mechanics like the Bell inequality.
I didn’t know that – thanks!
I’ll try to update ‘against’ Wolfram’s ideas at least a little based on that. (And I’ll try to be more charitable to string theory and update a little away from ‘string theory has been a giant waste of time’.)
In my opinion, Wolfram essentially does this:
finds out that some toy system is Turing-complete (previously cellular automata, now graphs);
says “therefore, this toy system could simulate a universe”;
gives a few extremely shallow analogies between some properties of the system and some known laws of physics (on the level of: “this thing grows, which is just like the expansion of the universe… this thing is moving at constant speed, which is just like the speed of light… and this thing changes unpredictably, which is just like quantum uncertainty”);
declares that he has thereby solved the deepest mysteries of physics, and expects applause.
The problem with his explanations is that it is the Turing-completeness itself that has the “can simulate universe” trait, and the choice of a specific toy model is completely irrelevant; the very point of Turing-completeness is that in some sense all toy models are equivalent to each other. And the Turing-completeness was known long before Wolfram, just like the hypothesis that the universe might be a computation. His only contribution is the only part that does not matter: finding yet another Turing-complete system. Dozens of them are already known.
The shallow analogies between the toy model and some known laws of physics are not only silly, but also irrelevant. The simulated universe does not have the same traits as the simulating machine—a gray rectangular computer can simulate a yellow sphere—and Wolfram talks about how the gray color is kinda similar to yellow. But precisely that should be irrelevant, if the universe is a computation.
Have you read NKS?
I’m not asking because you not having it read it would ‘disqualify’ your comment or anything. I’m just curious.
I can see some substance in what you wrote in this comment (and I recognize you as a generally very thoughtful commenter), but this still seems exaggerated and at least a little uncharitable.
Something that he did in NKS, and then further confirmed in his recent post about him writing the book, was just look at a bunch of examples. I thought that was an admirable instance of ‘original seeing’, if nothing else.
(And maybe even Wolfram himself has trouble keeping up with all of the relevant academic literature.)
I can understand that a lot – or maybe even literally all – of that work had been previously been done. The notes in the book do cite an awful lot of people tho! But I’m still not sure that anyone else had previously compiled it into a single work, let alone one that was accessible to people without an account thru, e.g. a university, to access academic journals. That seems, to me, to be valuable, in and of itself.
It does seem like Wolfram may have (nearly) permanently and irrevocably burned all of the bridges between himself and academia, and that’s very sad. And others have pointed out that he’s, if not just an asshole, possibly clinically disordered.
But enough people have also expressed, in various forms, that basically everything Wolfram has published, in any form, is completely bullshit and can be reasonably ignored entirely. That’s certainly making me think I shouldn’t bother sharing anything connected to him here, but I’m still not entirely convinced that something like this video, that another commenter on this post shared, is just entirely a mistake and stupid (and worthy of vitriol):
Eigenbros ep 117 - Jonathan Gorard (Wolfram Physics) - YouTube
I have read some articles by Wolfram, but not the books.
The video you linked, if I understand it correctly, says that (unlike with the rule 110), the latest Wolfram’s theory is not about simulating the universe, but rather that the structure of the space-time at/below the Planck length is actually a hypergraph evolving using some simple rewriting rules.
The idea that the universe may be discrete at small levels (and that the smoothness we observe is just applying the laws of statistics to zillions of Planck units) was already popular; the challenge is to propose the specific rules for the discrete levels so that their aggregates are compatible with the known laws of physics.
The guy in the video made three statements that sounded interesting:
that if you take those kinds of hypergraphs and rewriting rules where the order of applying the rules does not matter, and ask “what happens when the size of the graph goes to infinity”, you can derive the equation for Einstein–Hilbert action;
that if you have multiple possible rules… I forgot the details… it results in something like the many world of quantum physics;
that if Wolfram’s model is true, we should expect to find situations where the universe is not 3-dimensional, but has a slightly different Hausdorff dimension (or, as the YouTube subtitle generator calls it, “house dwarf dimension”), like 3.001 or 2.999.
My reaction:
The second statement sounds unimpressive (many possible alternative rules should logically result in many possible outcomes), but that could be because I misunderstood something.
The first statement is more impressive; deriving a specific equation sounds cool. So it seems to me that the best way to convince someone to take Wolfram’s theory seriously is to show them the derivation. (It wasn’t show in the video, it was just said that it exists.)
I am not sure about the third one. Seems to me that hypegraphs should allow an arbitrary number of dimensions. So on one hand, finding situations with different number of dimensions would be evidence in favor of the theory. On the other hand, how does the theory explain that usually the number is 3?
Summary:
Show me (not me specifically, but rather any physicist you want to convince to take Wolfram’s model seriously) how you can derive the equation for Einstein-Hilbert action from the assumption that you have a hypergraph and rules that are independent on order of their use. (Actually derive the equation, not just claim that it can be done.) That should impress people, I think.
I think of it as more that – in what they’re calling “multiway systems” – there are (often) several rules for how the hypergraph evolves and you can apply those rules in different orders. Instead of either picking a set of rules that is ‘invariant’ with respect to the order in which they’re applied, or trying to pick a clever algorithm for deciding that order, they consider the full ‘multiway hypergraph’ of all possible ‘application orderings’.
There’s some other impressive derivations they’ve done, supposedly, tho several are matching other prospective ‘quantum gravity’ theories (and several of those are really more like potential-quantum-gravity mathematical formalisms instead of strictly physics theories).
You’re right! They seem to be both ‘exploring’ all/LOTs of individual hypergraph systems, as well as looking for one that might match our observations of our own universe.
Jonathan Gorard claimed I think in one of the videos (shared by someone else in another comment on this post) that basically all of their work (e.g. academic papers, working papers, and code) is available on their website:
The Wolfram Physics Project: Finding the Fundamental Theory of Physics
Some papers from the “Technical Documents” page:
Some Relativistic and Gravitational Properties of the Wolfram Model [PDF]
Wolfram Physics Project | A Class of Models with the Potential to Represent Fundamental Physics
Some Quantum Mechanical Properties of the Wolfram Model [PDF]
You might like the notes I wrote up in another comment on this post about one of a few ideas someone else shared. The video is a podcast ‘interviewing’ the ‘math lead’ of the project, Gorard. The two videos with Gorard on the same podcast:
Eigenbros ep 117 - Jonathan Gorard (Wolfram Physics) - YouTube
Eigenbros ep 138 - Wolfram Physics Project Pt. 2 (w/ Jonathan Gorard) - YouTube
I found the second one to be particularly impressive just based on the details of the theory/model that Gorard shared. The first is still great too; just more of an introduction of the ideas.
From my perspective, this is a bad thing. If you can explain everything, you explain nothing. Science is about making predictions, not excuses. Not trying to be dogmatic here, I just don’t see how a theory that says “the universe could have any number of dimensions” is going to help you build something useful, such as a microwave oven.
If you had the hypergraph theory plus the extra conditions that make the predictions fit our universe, that would be useful. Because it could be used to actually predict things in our universe. I am not even asking for new predictions here, just for the theory to say something other than the very filters that were used to select the right kind of rules, and for that something to apply to our universe.
If you are looking for the rules that prove X, Y, Z, and after finding them exclaim “behold, my theory predicts X, Y, Z”, all that it proves is that X, Y, Z are not fundamentally incompatible with your model (maybe because your model is compatible with almost everything).
It would be valuable if you looked for rules that prove X and Y, and found out that all such rules also predict Z. Then you could say “my theory explains why if X and Y are true in our universe, then Z must be too”. That sounds interesting, if Z does not seem like an obvious consequence of X and Y.
The fictional Library of Babel contains the textbook with the Theory of Everything. Knowing this is not useful at all.
That’s what I meant by the part of my previous comment that you quoted.
But, aside from the physics, they’re also exploring the more general mathematics/computation of ‘multiway systems’ too. They’re the pioneers of the math and I think they’re effectively ‘nerd sniping’ themselves with interesting math/computer-science and that’s become something like a ‘parallel’ effort from the focus on deriving/finding a GUT that unifies (our specific) QM and GR.
They’ve found specific “extra conditions” that identify specific ‘hypergraphs’ (really the multiway system that generates a ‘multiway’ set/tree/whatever of hypergraph evolution) and those specific hypergraphs match up to, e.g. General Relativity (in at least some ways).
In the second podcast video with Gorard, he describes ‘experiments’ they’ve done with things they think might be equivalent to the particles in the Standard Model but it seems like they weren’t trying to (at that point), ‘derive’ them from ‘scratch’. That is apparently something they want to do, but it seems (very) plausible that reaching ‘particles’ from the Big Bang, and simulating that on a computer, might be its own future mega-project.
It seems to me like Wolfram’s project isn’t doing anything that all of the other GUTs or quantum-gravity theories/formalisms aren’t doing too. They’re all trying to find a more fundamental theorem from which the Standard Model and General Relativity can be derived, i.e. ‘emerge’ automatically.
AFAIK, ‘string theory’, in the fully general sense of all similar theories, doesn’t itself constrain the number of dimensions of the universe. Why is Wolfram’s theory/model different?
It seems like even if the only thing they end up doing is finding a ‘compressed’ version of QM+GR that that would in fact be a monumental achievement? I don’t know why that wouldn’t also predictably imply other new predictions.
I think I have heard people making similar objections against the string theory. I don’t know much about string theory to evaluate whether the objections are deserved. If they are, I would treat it as an argument against string theory, not as an argument if favor of Wolfram’s theory.
We are still talking about the potential of the new theory (possibly also string theory).
The original complaint is that the physics community does not take Wolfram’s ideas seriously. Some people seem to do, and they seem to promise amazing results soon. From my perspective, there are two options: if those amazing results are actually delivered and published (the actual proofs, not just a youtube video claiming that they could be done), the physics community will start paying attention. But if the amazing results never materialize (despite smart people working on the problem), then maybe it was all hype and no substance.
If there is tomorrow an equation proving theory of relativity from the first principles, and no one in academia pays attention to it, that would be the right moment to discuss the proof at Less Wrong.
I’ve now watched several videos, particularly a few with the ‘math lead’ of the Wolfram’s physics project, and I now do not think that the “physics community does not take Wolfram’s ideas seriously”. It seems like they do in fact have a good set of contributors and are making great progress (relative to expectations).
You’re absolutely right that it could be “all hype and no substance”, tho I don’t think that’s even a remote possibility beyond just physics. (The ‘math’ alone seems interesting, which is ‘more than enough’ IMO for any possible ‘math’ that someone might want to study/explore.)
A paper they’ve published (and one that’s available on the project’s website) about (some aspects of) relativity:
Some Relativistic and Gravitational Properties of the Wolfram Model [PDF]
(I haven’t read it myself yet.)
For anyone interested in Wolfram’s ideas but put off by his style, I encourage you to check out talks by Jonathan Gorard. He’s the main collaborator on the “physics project”, and strikes me as being more even-handed and less grandiose.
Here are some links:
Eigenbros ep 117 - Jonathan Gorard (Wolfram Physics)
Eigenbros ep 138 - Wolfram Physics Project Pt. 2 (w/ Jonathan Gorard)
Fast Diagrammatic Reasoning and Compositional Approaches to Fundamental Physics (Topos Institute Colloquium)
The first video (Eigenbros episode 117) is great – Jonathan Gorard shares a lot of interesting details!
He does in fact seem like a much more ‘standard degree’ of grandiose :)
My favorite quote so far from that first video:
(Sorry for replying so much to your comment!)
More notes about the second video:
They’ve used the Wolfram model (and some additional “mathematical technology” they developed) to compute an “entanglement entropy” that agrees (“exactly”) with the calculations using “path integrals using standard causal set theoretic techniques” – the latter tho seems to be a quantum field theory mathematical formalism that stills being developed
The particle physics is still “embryonic” – they have conjectures about particles being ‘persistent tangles in graphs/networks’, and some suggestive toy models, but no scattering amplitudes that can be calculated yet, and an estimate ‘5-6’ mathematical milestones remain before they reach things like that
One of the hosts asks about ‘emergence’ (which seems a little ‘cringe’ to my old ears; I liked the idea, but it’s pretty simple on its own, and was heavily abused as a marketing buzzword) – Gorard’s answer is wonderful tho;
The other host mentioned that the computational focus of the theory seemed ‘correct’, and something that was overdue in physics education in his opinion – I don’t think they’ve read NKS! They’d probably like it.
The field/gauge theory connections are preliminary but promising; they matched some calculation for electromagnetism (for a “Dirac monopole”) but haven’t completed others.
They’re some interesting discussion of ‘avoiding curve fitting’ – “a good model is one where everything that can be emergent is emergent”
There’s some experimental investigations ongoing (or were as of October 2021) in “dimension perturbations” in the early universe and “dimension perturbations” and their effect on the propagation of light (for astrophysics); the hope for the latter is to be ably to compute/calculate predictions of the effects of “small scale dimension perturbations”. [One aspect of the theory is that spacetime is expected to (or just could?) be of fractional dimension, instead of an exact integer ‘topological dimension’.]
Overall, I’m not sure Wolfram’s physics theory is under-appreciated. It seems like there’s a good sized team making good progress and that, at worst, it’s still a bunch of cool math/science/computering.
The second video is really interesting!
Jonathan Gorard, discussing the math, is very convincing. He said some very intriguing things about practical benefits with the theory for “quantum computation optimization”, e.g. “circuit simplification for quantum computers” (for experiments or simulations).
His description of quantum computing, using the ‘multiway systems’, as ‘a statistical ensemble of inputs, on which the multiway system then performs all possible computations, producing a statistic ensemble of outputs’.
In the first video, Gorard stated that the “worst case” outcome of the project, in his view, would be a bunch of really cool math/computation. I think they might be a good bit past that already. (The first two videos were recorded about five months apart.)
Another great quote from the second video: ‘multiway systems give you something like a path integral approach to computation’. That’s something. (I don’t really know what, but it seems cool!)
(My math creds are a BA (and one graduate seminar class) and being generally interested. I’ve one some very amateurish ‘original math’ that was almost certainly independent re-discovery, to the extent I finished any of it. I make a living via classical computer programming.)
Before just what of the second video I’ve now watched, I didn’t think quantum computing would ever ‘really work’. (I don’t think ‘quantum supremacy’ has been definitely demonstrated still?) A big part of that was due to intuitions I picked up from reading NKS. That is very interesting that NKS+ is what has now convinced me that it probably will be working and practical. I excuse myself as having been driven mad learning about the continuity of the real numbers! (I just didn’t think our universe could be made of real numbers!)
So, the Wolfram Physics theory is: discrete (“quantized”), computational, multiway (‘many worlds’, “path integral”, ‘statistical’), and Jonathan Gorard seems like a legit mathematician/computer-scientist
I like the idea that the underlying ‘quantized quantumness’ of spacetime (everything) might be a discrete “statistical ensemble”.
Glad you liked it! I think the ideas are very interesting too, for I think similar reasons to you.
Will be curious to see how much further they go.
I’m very satisfied at making this post, if only from being pointed at those videos!
Thanks!
I’m going to add them to my ‘read later’ list now.
This sounds maybe exactly the same as Tegmark Level 4 Multiverse. Does anyone know if there are differences?
I agree!
I don’t have much technical background, but they’re both so abstract that I’m not sure anyone really does. The only obvious (perhaps superficial) difference is Wolfram’s is a “computation universe” versus Tegmark’s “mathematical universe”.
(I would think that, ultimately, they’re equivalent, but Wolfram has generally considered ‘computation’ to be more general than ‘mathematics’, and that matches my own (weak) intuitions. I suspect tho that it might be more of a difference in emphasis, if not just literally a difference only in the terminology used.)
May be Tegmark’s mathematical universe could include uncomputable things?
That seems like it would be a HUGE difference if that were the case.
That reminds me of this, one of my favorite papers/essays:
Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity – Scott Aaronson [PDF]
Yes, great paper.
As I know Tegmark didn’t specify the structure of mathematical universe. Does it include all strange math objects like infinities and categories etc?
There is a different theory of mathematical universe by Mueller in Law without law. In it only observer moments exist, as number strings, connected by Kolmogorov complexity of transition between them. Similar to UDASSA.
In my view, Wolfram suggests a interesting bridge between nothing and all possible physics world. But he neither explain appearance if universe from nothing, nor details of our world.
I’m not sure his attempts at the first explanation would suffice (for you, or almost anyone), but it seems rather like a generic ‘anthropic’ explanation AFAICT.
I think he (and his collaborators) are actively working on the “details of our world” part.
Not mine, since there are uncomputable functions.
I’ve taken the time to study the Wolfram Model for about 2.5 years now, post December 2020 update to the model. I’ve learned enough about it to give operational definition and applicability to model systems, and to create systems under that framework.
I think people simply don’t understand the implications of this work...like at all. As someone that also studied physics for a long time...some of the issues of physics poke out even more glaringly when viewed through Wolfram’s model...about how backwards the current physics paradigm is.
Most of the criticisms are aimed at his persona...which has nothing to do with science. When the critics do want to talk science, they always bring up the things that blatantly misdirect the argument. For example bringing up “does it make predictions” when he just spoke for 20 minutes about computational irreducibility lmao.
Did he ever show how the Bell inequality could be derived from his system?
I’m fairly sure he hadn’t done that when last I read about it (a few years ago I think), but maybe they’ve made some progress on that since?
Wolfram’s arrogance isn’t on the level of literary convention, it’s on the level of personality disorder. For example:
When he wrote an eulogy for a famous scientist/author who had just died (Freemon Dyson? I forget and can’t find it), the “eulogy” talked a lot more about how great Stephen Wolfram was than about its supposed subject. I don’t merely mean to say that he failed to be adequately humble about his own achievements, I mean to say that the overall focus of the eulogy was on Wolfram and not on the person who died.
Every time I’ve seen him write about a subject matter I know, he has wildly exaggerated his achievements. This was particularly obvious when he wrote about the Wolfram Language, as programming languages are my thing. (The Wolfram Language is quite remarkable in some ways, just not the ways he took credit for.)
You have noticed he names everything after himself, right?
Note that this is not me disliking writing that sounds arrogant while delivering interesting ideas. I love Yudkowski’s writing.
EDIT: This doesn’t necessarily contradict what you said, because you were talking about the book and I am talking about his blog posts. I haven’t looked at his book in a very long time because I’m not convinced it says anything interesting beyond studying Cellular Automata in depth.
I like Yudkowsky too (and a LOT), but I’m not blind to the (very good) reasons why so many other people think he’s insufferably arrogant!
And Wolfram might be even more arrogant than EY!
I’m just personally indifferent to in either case, and it remains true that whether their ideas are true or useful is, ultimately, independent of their personalities.
I’ve read a good bit in … the last decade or so? … about the many many instances of ‘co-discovery’ and I find that it’s generally good for (many) people to ‘repeat’ the same claims and theories. Often it’s helpful, for me and I think many others, to better understand any particular thing because different explanations by different people aid that understanding in different ways; often very different ways. So, even if there was literally nothing novel in it, I still consider it interesting and valuable to me. And had it been broken up and published as dozens (or more) of academic papers, I probably wouldn’t have been exposed to much of the info at all.
But the book is freely available on the web! You can try reading it from the beginning, or pick a random section. If you can separate the material from your feelings about his disordered personality, you might find it to be pretty good, even if it’s not useful for yourself specifically.
I’m quite happy to separate content from presentation, I just remember there not being a lot of content beyond cellular automata and vague grand claims, last time I looked.
Fair enough!
Some of the “vague grand claims” I still find useful/insightful:
There are (roughly) four classes of ‘complexity’: ‘static’, ‘simple repetition and nesting’, ‘randomness’, and ‘history’
‘Universal computation is common and cheap’ – this seems more and more confirmed via, e.g. various ‘Turing completeness’ results
Computation is (in some important sense(s)) ‘more general’ than mathematics (particularly the parts of it that mathematicians study) – on the other hand, I’d guess ‘computation’ and ‘math’ are ‘technically’ equivalent; on the gripping hand, one of my favorite Scott Aaronson papers/essays makes me think there might be a bit more to this
A lot of natural systems really can be modeled as ‘simple programs’, and much more easily/‘naturally’ than as simple mathematical systems
The obnoxious break from physics paper writing conventions on Wolfram’s part is just stupid. He has a physics PhD, he’s perfectly capable of writing papers, his choice not to do so is making it very difficult for graduate students in physics to work on his program at all. Right now working on this is career suicide for a graduate student. You don’t publish your new theory of everything in a book aimed at a popular audience if you want anyone else to seriously work on it. You don’t get to claim to have solved fundamental physics in a popular book and then cross your arms and complain that you aren’t getting the recognition you deserve, that is the arrogance that people are bothered by, not his writing style. Yet his ideas might very well have merit, even if he isn’t the first one at all to consider that the universe might be fundamentally computational in nature.
Isn’t it also arrogance on the part of the professional physics community that working on his theories is considered “career suicide” just because he wrote it in an unconventional format? Not saying Wolfram is blameless here, just that it seems sort of silly for that to be such a sticking point.
I think the problem is that Wolfram wrote things up in a manner indistinguishable from a perpetual-motion-believer-who-actually-can-write-well’s treatise. Maybe it’s instead legit, but to discover that you have to spend a lot of translation effort, translation effort that Wolfram was supposed to have done himself in digestible chunks rather than telling N=lots of people to each do it themselves, and it’s not even clear there is something at the heart because (last time I checked which was a couple years ago) no physics-knowledgable people who dived in seemed to come up and say “ah, yep, it’s legit, there’s real insight and truth here beyond cataloging really cool computational phenomena”.
I have seen
this sentiment a ton, and also stuff like
-- Sabine Hossenfelder (https://twitter.com/skdh/status/1252124072512757761)
this from folks who do have sufficient technical background.
I happen to think there probably are lots of really import insights to be had, and also that most or all of the ones that Wolfram has had so far are equivalent to existing results in existing branches of mathematics, and he’d realize that himself if he did try to break his work down into actually digestible concrete chunks, but all of that’s off of my intuition, not expertise.
I think it’s fine if someone else does the work to “break his work down into actually digestible concrete chunks” for the benefit of other academics.
My naive outsider impression of physics is that, at least on the theoretical side, basically no one really knows what the promising avenues to pursue might be.
Having just read his post about the writing of the book (NKS), I’m hopeful that he will, eventually, publish a ‘bibliography’ that does a better job of translating the book, and its voluminous notes, into a form that’s ‘more accessible’ to the relevant academics.
I’m torn about this.
I absolutely sympathize with what you describe. It certainly seems like he was both capable of doing what you claim he should have done and that, had he done so, his work would have probably been ‘better accepted’.
But, on the other hand, this just seems like a really terrible argument – that the only way to discover any new and important things is thru ‘The Official Channels’. Physics isn’t, AFAIK, the worst academic discipline, but it’s not obvious to me that that ‘academy’ is providing more value to the world than it is ‘rents’ to its members.
I haven’t seen him directly and explicitly complain about not “getting the recognition [he] deserve[s]”. If anything, he seems too optimistic about the recognition he’s supposedly already received!
I think it’s fine if the work to integrate whatever it is he’s discovered with all of the relevant academic disciplines is work that someone else does later. I don’t think he’s obligated to have done that work himself.
I myself greatly appreciate that he did not write a whole series of academic articles, written in an interminably dry and stuffy academic style, and published in journals that I couldn’t reasonably afford to access. (I think most mathematics papers are now freely available, but I don’t know that the same is true for physics papers. I’m not sure even that most computer science papers are freely available.)
I’m imagining the situation from the perspective of a graduate student in physics interested in Wolfram’s ideas. In the current system, such a student could not justify to their advisor why they’d work on Wolfram’s project, you can’t work on an unorganized cluster of ideas published in a pop-science book without sacrificing some of your capital as a graduate student. Potential departments where you’d like to post-doc will look at you weirdly, no one will cite your papers because no one is working on this, etc. By doing things as he hid, Wolfram is asking everyone who might work on his theory to pay a large social and professional cost. I agree that the current physics publishing equilibrium might not be the optimal one, but the establishment has two hundred years of glorious, shining history to back it up, basically everyone who ever found something important about math or the universe wrote it in a paper, that’s a hell of a thing to throw away on your own. Going with the tradition is a lot more productive than screaming at the sky trying to change the equilibrium single-handedly.
I’m much more confident that there are in fact ‘enough graduate students’ working on Wolfram’s physics project after watching some videos that someone else kindly shared elsewhere in the comments on this post.
The ‘math lead’ of the project – Jonathan Gorard – has mentioned work being done by both former and current students. This video includes some of that (and is otherwise really interesting):
Eigenbros ep 138 - Wolfram Physics Project Pt. 2 (w/ Jonathan Gorard) - YouTube
(Some of his current students are working on some really cool experimental tests of the Wolfram theory/model!)
My ‘model’ of the ‘current system’s resistance’ is some mix of: (a) Wolfram being a (HUGE) ‘asshole’ (or maybe ‘literally disordered’ in personality or temperament); (b) basically all of the old guard ‘sticking to’ continuous mathematics and dismissing any ‘fundamentally discrete’ alternatives out of hand.
Wolfram’s emphasis on ‘computation’ over ‘mathematics’ is probably also contributing to this somewhat, but, in the video above, it seems like younger physicists/academics might be much more receptive to this than ‘the oldguard’. Apparently some areas/branches of physics are already pretty, or heavily, ‘computational’. Fundamental (particle) physics seems like the big holdout in that sense.
I really have a lot of sympathy tho for anyone trying to “change the equilibrium single-handedly”, even if it’s not likely to succeed.
I’m not sure I’d every expect the equilibrium to change otherwise!
Are there specific obstacles to ‘moving to a new equilibrium’ that you’d also expect to no longer apply at any specific point in the future?
My intuition is that it’s most likely to be disrupted or changed because of a significant ‘defection’ and not because of some future coordination.
Wolfram’s ideas absolutely are under-appreciated but he’s also a questionable spokesman for them.
The most important things he brings to the table, imho, are a more deliberate exploration on how simple mathematical precursors can lead to immense complexity (and order) in reality and the notion that if we really, rationally, want to survive the intelligence explosion then we need to create (and stick to using) a universal programing language for use in the creation of all A.I..
It is easy to see that a truly rational species would indeed take this precaution. It is also easy to see that this combines perfectly with the concepts of things like EM’s Neuralink (and the many sci-fi writers and futurists proceeding him who also posited that creating a way to interface with machines pre-AGI is a good way to optimize for better common value systems with A.I.)
Sadly all such visionaries, including Yudkowsky, will likely continue to be mocked for their eccentricities rather than taken seriously for their important ideas. Meanwhile Google and China continue to go full speed forward in creating multi-capable A.I. (and thus continue to increase the likelihood of them accidentally unleashing multi-capable optimization agents)
People allergic to Stephen Wolfram and criticizing “Wolfram Physics” (e.g. Scott Aaronson) would better contribute to the conversation by reading Jonathan Gorard’s publications, forming their opinion of the content of that published work, and expressing their non-ad-Wolfram criticisms. The broader “culture clash” problem is that Wolfram Physics is a metaphysical theory rather than a physics theory: it explains physics theories such as general relativity and quantum mechanics, rather than explaining a specific physical phenomenon. (Further physics theories can be advanced within Wolfram Physics.)