Wolfram's Approach DOES Deserve Better Than The Reception It's Gotten

scientificamerican  |  Most scientists would readily tell you that their discipline is—and always has been—a collaborative, communal process. Nobody can revolutionize a scientific field without first getting the critical appraisal and eventual validation of their peers. Today this requirement is performed through peer review—a process Wolfram’s critics say he has circumvented with his announcement. “Certainly there’s no reason that Wolfram and his colleagues should be able to bypass formal peer review,” Mack says. “And they definitely have a much better chance of getting useful feedback from the physics community if they publish their results in a format we actually have the tools to deal with.”

Mack is not alone in her concerns. “It’s hard to expect physicists to comb through hundreds of pages of a new theory out of the blue, with no buildup in the form of papers, seminars and conference presentations,” says Sean Carroll, a physicist at Caltech. “Personally, I feel it would be more effective to write short papers addressing specific problems with this kind of approach rather than proclaiming a breakthrough without much vetting.”

So why did Wolfram announce his ideas this way? Why not go the traditional route? “I don't really believe in anonymous peer review,” he says. “I think it’s corrupt. It’s all a giant story of somewhat corrupt gaming, I would say. I think it’s sort of inevitable that happens with these very large systems. It’s a pity.”

So what are Wolfram’s goals? He says he wants the attention and feedback of the physics community. But his unconventional approach—soliciting public comments on an exceedingly long paper—almost ensures it shall remain obscure. Wolfram says he wants physicists’ respect. The ones consulted for this story said gaining it would require him to recognize and engage with the prior work of others in the scientific community.

And when provided with some of the responses from other physicists regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. “I’m disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you’re communicating,” he grumbles. “I deserve better.”

Is It Computation All The Way Down?

edge |  We're now in this situation where people just assume that science can compute everything, that if we have all the right input data and we have the right models, science will figure it out. If we learn that our universe is fundamentally computational, that throws us right into the idea that computation is a paradigm you have to care about. The big transition was from using equations to describe how everything works to using programs and computation to describe how things work. And that's a transition that has happened after 300 years of equations. The transition time to using programs has been remarkably quick, a decade or two. One area that was a holdout, despite the transition of many fields of science into the computational models direction, was fundamental physics.

If we can firmly establish this fundamental theory of physics, we know it's computation all the way down. Once we know it's computation all the way down, we're forced to think about it computationally. One of the consequences of thinking about things computationally is this phenomenon of computational irreducibility. You can't get around it. That means we have always had the point of view that science will eventually figure out everything, but computational irreducibility says that can't work. It says that even if we know the rules for the system, it may be the case that we can't work out what that system will do any more efficiently than basically just running the system and seeing what happens, just doing the experiment so to speak. We can't have a predictive theoretical science of what's going to happen.

The question that I'm asking myself is how does the universe work? What is the lowest level machine code for how our universe works? The big surprise to me is that over the last six months or so, I think we've figured out a path to be able to answer that question.

There's a lot of detail about how what we figured out about the path to that question relates to what's already known in physics. Once we know this is the low-level machine code for the universe, what can we then ask ourselves about why we have this universe and not another? Can we ask questions like why does this universe exist? Why does any universe exist? Some of those are questions that people asked a couple thousand years ago.

Lots of Greek philosophers had their theories for how the universe fundamentally works. We've gotten many layers of physics and mathematics sophistication since then, but what I'm doing goes back to these core questions of how things fundamentally work underneath. For us, it's this simple structure that involves elements and relations that build into hypergraphs that evolve in certain ways, and then these hypergraphs build into multiway graphs and multiway causal graphs. From pieces of the way those work, we see what relativity is, what quantum mechanics is, and so on.

One of the questions that comes about when you imagine that you might hold in your hand a rule that will generate our whole universe, how do you then think about that? What's the way of understanding what's going on? One of the most obvious questions is why did we get this universe and not another? In particular, if the rule that we find is a comparatively simple rule, how did we get this simple-rule universe?

Different Than Penrose and Weinstein: Wolfram REALLY Mesmerized By Rule 30

dr.brian.keating |  On the philosophical front, we compared Godel to Popper and discussed computational irreducibly which arose from Stephen’s interest in Godel and Alan Turing’s work.

“Actually, there’s even more than that. If the microscopic updatings of the underlying network end up being random enough, then it turns out that if the network succeeds in corresponding in the limit to a finite dimensional space, then this space must satisfy Einstein’s Equations of General Relativity. It’s again a little like what happens with fluids. If the microscopic interactions between molecules are random enough, but satisfy number and momentum conservation, then it follows that the overall continuum fluid must satisfy the standard Navier–Stokes equations. But now we’re deriving something like that for the universe: we’re saying that these networks with almost nothing “built in” somehow generate behavior that corresponds to gravitation in physics. This is all spelled out in the NEW KIND OF SCIENCE book. And many physicists have certainly read that part of the book. But somehow every time I actually describe this (as I did a few days ago), there’s a certain amazement. Special and General Relativity are things that physicists normally assume are built into theories right from the beginning, almost as axioms (or at least, in the case of string theory, as consistency conditions). The idea that they could emerge from something more fundamental is pretty alien. The alien feeling doesn’t stop there. Another thing that seems alien is the idea that our whole universe and its complete history could be generated just by starting with some particular small network, then applying definite rules. For the past 75+ years, quantum mechanics has been the pride of physics, and it seems to suggest that this kind of deterministic thinking just can’t be correct. It’s a slightly long story (often still misunderstood by physicists), but between the arbitrariness of updating orders that produce a given causal network, and the fact that in a network one doesn’t just have something like local 3D space, it looks as if one automatically starts to get a lot of the core phenomena of quantum mechanics — even from what’s in effect a deterministic underlying model. OK, but what is the rule for our universe? I don’t know yet. Searching for it isn’t easy. One tries a sequence of different possibilities. Then one runs each one. Then the question is: has one found our universe?”

My question: that was then, what do you think now?

On the implications of finding a simple rule that matches existing laws of physics:

“I certainly think it’ll be an interesting — almost metaphysical — moment if we finally have a simple rule which we can tell is our universe. And we’ll be able to know that our particular universe is number such-and-such in the enumeration of all possible universes. It’s a sort of Copernican moment: we’ll get to know just how special or not our universe is. Something I wonder is just how to think about whatever the answer turns out to be. It somehow reminds me of situations from earlier in the history of science. Newton figured out about motion of the planets, but couldn’t imagine anything but a supernatural being first setting them in motion. Darwin figured out about biological evolution, but couldn’t imagine how the first living cell came to be. We may have the rule for the universe, but it’s something quite different to understand why it’s that rule and not another. Universe hunting is a very technology-intensive business. Over the years, I’ve gradually been building up the technology I think is needed — and quite a bit of it is showing up in strange corners of Mathematica. But I think it’s going to be a while longer before there are more results. And before we can put “Our Universe” as a Demonstration in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. And before we can take our new ParticleData computable data collection and derive every number in it. But universe hunting is a good hobby.”

It’s awfully easy to fall into implicitly assuming a lot of human context. Pioneer 10 — the human artifact that’s gone further into interstellar space than any other (currently about 11 billion miles, which is about 0.05% of the distance to α Centauri) — provides one of my favorite examples. There’s a plaque on that spacecraft that includes a representation of the wavelength of the 21-centimeter spectral line of hydrogen. Now the most obvious way to represent that would probably just be a line 21 cm long. But back in 1972 Carl Sagan and others decided to do something “more scientific”, and instead made a schematic diagram of the quantum mechanical process leading to the spectral line. The problem is that this diagram relies on conventions from human textbooks — like using arrows to represent quantum spins — that really have nothing to do with the underlying concepts and are incredibly specific to the details of how science happened to develop for us humans.”

From the audience he responded to some questions including “what does he believe a scientific theory should be?” and “Does mathematical beauty matter at all, or is it just falsifiability?”

The Story of Rule 30

How can something that simple produce something that complex? It’s been nearly 40 years since I first saw rule 30 — but it still amazes me. Long ago it became my personal all-time favorite science discovery, and over the years it’s changed my whole worldview and led me to all sorts of science, technology, philosophy and more.

A Class of Models with the Potential to Represent Fundamental Physics

arvix |  Stephen Wolfram A class of models intended to be as minimal and structureless as possible is introduced. Even in cases with simple rules, rich and complex behavior is found to emerge, and striking correspondences to some important core known features of fundamental physics are seen, suggesting the possibility that the models may provide a new approach to finding a fundamental theory of physics.

Subjects:	Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc); High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th); Mathematical Physics (math-ph)
Cite as:	arXiv:2004.08210 [cs.DM]
	(or arXiv:2004.08210v1 [cs.DM] for this version)

Bibliographic data

[Enable Bibex (What is Bibex?)]

Submission history

From: Stephen Wolfram [view email]

[v1] Wed, 15 Apr 2020 16:23:43 UTC (108,032 KB)