thenewredStephen Wolfram's Fundamental Theory of Physics is based on the idea that simple rules can cause complex patterns of our universe to emerge and elegantly explains relativity and quantum mechanics
he does love the cellular automata.
cybericHe kind of invented it. He did write the major book in the field
He absolutely did not invent CA. His book was published well after it had become an established modeling technique. Conway’s game of life was published in 1970. Complexity theory modeling had moved well past CA by the time Wolfram’s book came out, to the point that most of us didn’t know why he bothered writing it, much less thought it would revolutionize science.
barkingspidersI’ve been puzzled about the seemingly quiet reception Wolfram’s idea seem to receive from the serious scientific community. He doesn’t seem like a huxter and to my uneducated ears it sounds like a plausible set of ideas. Like other people are saying it’s all a bit over my head.
But like, no one talks about it. Is it just blase or not particular relevant even if true, or just less useful than he seems to think?
SmokeyDopeThe idea that simple rules complex behavior is not new and wolfram was not the first mathematician to realize it. I’m big into fractal geometry so I would say Mandelbrot was the first 20th century mathematician to really get that concept along side the precursor chaos theorist but even their realizations about the fractal nature of the universe ride off shoulders of others work. I guess for computational mathematicians, the fractal nature of the universe and the simple rules making complex systems is new and mind blowing, for me and everyone whos read through deep simplicity and are famili its old ideas recycled into a new branch of mathematics reworded in terms a computer scientist thinks in.
That’s some great perspective, thanks for the detailed reply!
It does seem like one difference here, then, is that the theory is now in the hands of people with tools and knowledge to scale it much bigger and longer than anyone previously could. This could lead to it finding frontiers instead of just new people discovering an old thing.
Kinda like how neural nets have existed since like the 80s but only more recently have we had the computational resources to actually make them do something more interesting than fit to a complex math equation.
Or 3D graphics, where the math existed long before computers could render them, and then eventually they could render images, then later it resulted in Doom, and 3D animation, and things have exploded in that space since then.
Or how the first computer programmer existed long before the first computer but programming didn’t really take off until well after the computer existed.
I don’t know if Wolfram has something groundbreaking here. Maybe he has, maybe he’s wasting time. But from reading that paper, it’s clear that if this is something, it’s something that requires a scale that isn’t realistic for humans to explore on their own without tools to automate it. It’s possible that it requires a scale that even computers today can’t get close to, maybe they never will. Like, for example, if they do find the rules and try to run a simulation smaller than a galaxy, would stars even show up at that scale? Planets? Black holes? Having a galaxy the size of ours and others we see might depend on having a universe as big as ours, otherwise it doesn’t have enough variation to result in structures this large, which then might make it look like the real rules aren’t what we are looking for.