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.
(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.