I’ve tried to read through the linked page, and swapped to `academic reading’ (checking the pictures, and sometimes the first and last line of paragraphs) halfway through. I think this is not viable.
There is a host of “theories of the universe” with a similar structure on a meta-level, consisting of some kind of emergent complexity. It is important to keep in mind the strength of a theory lies in what it forbids, not in what it permits. To date most theories of the universe fail this test hard, by being so vague and nonspecific that any scientific concept can be pattern-matched to some aspect of it. Judging by what I’ve read so far this is no exception (and in fact, I suspect that the reason Wolfram references so many big scientific theories is because large concepts are easier to pattern-match, whereas specific predictions are not as open to interpretation). Why will his patterns produce Einstein’s equations (note that they currently do no such thing, he states we first need to “find the right universe”), and not Newton’s, or Einstein’s with double the speed of light?
As always with these nonspecific `theories’ it is very difficult to nail down one specific weakness. But currently all I’m seeing are red flags. I predict serious media attention and possibly some relevant discoveries in physics (some of the paragraphs sounded better than all other crackpot theories I’ve seen), but the majority of it seems wrong/worthless.
The technical reports do seem to contain at least one strong, surprising prediction:
This [multiway formulation of QM] leads to an immediate, and potentially testable, prediction of our interpretation of quantum mechanics: namely that, following appropriate coarse-graining...the class of problems that can be solved efficiently by quantum computers should be identical to the class of problems that can be solved efficiently by classical computers. More precisely, we predict in this appropriately coarse-grained case that P = BQP...
Of course Wolfram and Gorard are not the only people to say this, but it’s definitely a minority view these days and would be very striking if it were somehow proved.
It appears that an implicit prediction is that at least a good fraction of dark matter would consist of almost arbitrarily low mass low interaction particles in obscene quantities, that froze out at absurd temperatures in the early universe before momentum-redshifting to near zero velocity such that they behave more like matter than radiation in gravity wells (unlike neutrinos which normally move far too fast to stay bound anywhere).
So if BQP turns out to be larger than P, will Wolfram announce his theory wrong or rather modify its predictions? This would be a great test of… himself.
I’ve tried to read through the linked page, and swapped to `academic reading’ (checking the pictures, and sometimes the first and last line of paragraphs) halfway through. I think this is not viable.
There is a host of “theories of the universe” with a similar structure on a meta-level, consisting of some kind of emergent complexity. It is important to keep in mind the strength of a theory lies in what it forbids, not in what it permits. To date most theories of the universe fail this test hard, by being so vague and nonspecific that any scientific concept can be pattern-matched to some aspect of it. Judging by what I’ve read so far this is no exception (and in fact, I suspect that the reason Wolfram references so many big scientific theories is because large concepts are easier to pattern-match, whereas specific predictions are not as open to interpretation). Why will his patterns produce Einstein’s equations (note that they currently do no such thing, he states we first need to “find the right universe”), and not Newton’s, or Einstein’s with double the speed of light?
As always with these nonspecific `theories’ it is very difficult to nail down one specific weakness. But currently all I’m seeing are red flags. I predict serious media attention and possibly some relevant discoveries in physics (some of the paragraphs sounded better than all other crackpot theories I’ve seen), but the majority of it seems wrong/worthless.
The technical reports do seem to contain at least one strong, surprising prediction:
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/some-quantum-mechanical-properties-of-the-wolfram-model.pdf
Of course Wolfram and Gorard are not the only people to say this, but it’s definitely a minority view these days and would be very striking if it were somehow proved.
Thanks, convinced!
It appears that an implicit prediction is that at least a good fraction of dark matter would consist of almost arbitrarily low mass low interaction particles in obscene quantities, that froze out at absurd temperatures in the early universe before momentum-redshifting to near zero velocity such that they behave more like matter than radiation in gravity wells (unlike neutrinos which normally move far too fast to stay bound anywhere).
So if BQP turns out to be larger than P, will Wolfram announce his theory wrong or rather modify its predictions? This would be a great test of… himself.