There's even observer effect are […] he concludes that the universe itself would then be an automaton, like a giant computer. Even if everything he said was correct, he’d have discovered nothing and it would be up to somebody else after him to actually discover something. And how come your revolutionary ideas aren’t being taken seriously? Wolfram also points out that although the generated model universes can be tested against observations the framework itself is not amenable to experimental falsification. When allowing relations between more than two elements, this moves from graphs to hypergraphs. If an event occurs once and only once in the Universe, the choice of an objective description obviously must be just that – a choice. In general, the work is pretty neat. Wolfram, who works with a couple of collaborators, describes how relativity and space-time curvature are an emergent property in these universes. What’s more, scientists have found ways to combine these rules into simpler, more powerful ones. About the universe: yes, I have been investigating the hypothesis that the universe follows simple rules that can be described by a program. No need to fight among ourselves over who has the best tools. Graph based models also seem to be conceptually compatible with string theory …”. unity was void And very separately, the speed of light had been measured, but nobody knew what light was. Wolfram: The concept of computation doesn’t in any way presuppose the existence of mind... and it’s an incorrect summarization of my work to say that I suggest “the universe is a computer.”. In Wolfram's proposed model of the universe, all possible variations take place But that basic implication means that in a very literal sense, no experiment can actually be completely repeated, and the results of all experiments *are* actually subjective. look mostly the same. Amazing! “restricted to” substitute “restricted from”. the Wolfram Language and uses it to generate diagrams of networks. I should clarify that when I say “injected by fiat” that doesn’t mean those things are somehow *wrong* – like I said, they’re essentially postulates. (come up in circuit design tools, where everything connected to the same node IS the same node, but you want to talk about a specific line on the schematic diagram. He's not saying that the universe is a computer (ie, that it was "built"), but he is saying that it's computational in nature. “At this point I am certain that the basic framework we have is … That’s the “bang” part. Please deactivate your ad blocker in order to see our subscription offer, Genshin Impact tier list: The best Genshin Impact characters, Cyberpunk 2077 gets new, more detailed system requirements. If one could run the model long enough, then it is intended to reproduce everything about the universe, including the writing of this answer. A rule – a pattern of behavior – does not exist before you have something to exhibit that pattern. So any theory which predicts what happens in that portion of the Universe is *untestable*. Language and its ability to simulate this model of the universe. Please, don’t be such a boron this subject! eventually agree. This may seem a trivial matter but any model of space must, at a bare minimum, be able to represent basic geometry and it is non-trivial to do that with discrete models. © 2020 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc. Support our award-winning coverage of advances in science & technology. Save up to 70% off the cover price when you subscribe to Discover magazine. You might say “well, that’s nonsense, atoms still existed before the CMB, it’s just that the temperature was too high for them to form.” But that’s a preference – it’s equally valid to say that, in some sense, the lower-energy laws of physics *didn’t exist yet*. This is a very comforting concept. In fact, this is pretty trivially demonstrated to be wrong. relativity and the Horgan: Can the methods you describe in A New Kind of Science answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing? Numerous interesting ideas have fallen by the wayside because their predictions are the same as conventional or better-known theories. Graph based models also seem to be conceptually compatible with string theory where strings may be describable as subgraphs. “WHERE WILL IT ALL LEAD?” indeed. While these phenomena tell us that the current Standard Model of particle physics is incomplete they might still be explainable within the current frameworks of QFT and GR. Stephen Wolfram is best known for his work in computer science but he actually started his career in physics. theory states that They’re things that scientists/physicists basically have *agreed* are necessary for testable theories. Wolfram and his colleagues think they have already identified the right class of rules and constructed models that reproduce some basic principles of general relativity and quantum mechanics. I have some background in mathematics and I look at the concept of infinity and its use in calculus applied to “continuous” space as being a clever an effective mathematical tool with some significant limitations when applied to the real world (e.g. I guess when we argon it will reveal that place. Science IS building models that predict observations. There are many ways of looking at the same phenomenon and it’s not worth looking into the details too much. Wow, the Big Bang didn’t happen?! mcu_nerd has added a new log for Raising Tadpoles. That’s pretty much a basic definition of arrogance, so it’s not exactly a leap to call him that. This impression undoubtedly had a detrimental effect on the way Wolfram’s ideas were received and how they have spread. When we say that the orbit of the Earth is determined by a differential equation, we’re just saying that the equation describes what the Earth does; we’re not suggesting that there are little machines inside the Earth solving the equation. both caused by what has been named You have the same problem whether it’s rule based or probability based (where did those probabilities come from, heck where did the choices come from). Wolfram’s work would certainly benefit from broad collaboration and development. It is at least worth a try applying discrete models to physics. Konrad Zuse probably was the first who considered ideas along these lines – “Der Rechnende Raum”: AFAIK, he was able to derive the laws of Special Relativity with his approach, and later, Carl Adam Petri (-> Petri Nets) also did work in this direction. I think discrete models deserve more attention but there is a lot of work to be done if they are to compete with existing models. Time takes place in discrete steps, like the frames of a movie. … and we wondered where all the corrupt science and quack pots disappeared… I’m happy flat earthers will keep asking the really hard questions. See Q&As with Steven Weinberg, George Ellis, Carlo Rovelli, Edward Witten, Scott Aaronson, Sabine Hossenfelder, Priyamvada Natarajan, Garrett Lisi, Paul Steinhardt, Lee Smolin, Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Stuart Kauffman, Christof Koch, Rupert Sheldrake and Sheldon Solomon. on making advancements which benefit society. The “laws of physics” are math formulas believed to be useful at predicting nature, so of course they’re not subjective; they either predict accurately, or they do not. Maybe sometimes. The ultimate idea of many is to arrive at one unified theory of everything: where one framework elegantly encompasses the entirety of nature's laws. Computation is just about following definite rules. Wolfram says this implies that the radius of an electron is about 10^-81 m. The current experimental evidence is that the radius is less than 10^-22 m. His theory also predicts that mass is quantized into units about 10^36 times smaller than the mass of an electron. In other words, the laws of physics as we know them seemed to emerge from the repetition of simple rules, without those laws being 'coded into' the simulation. Wolfram and his collaborator Jonathan Gorard, a physics Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge and a consultant at Wolfram Research, found that this kind of model could reproduce some of the aspects of quantum theory and Einstein’s general theory … valid. The universe is what it is, and that will ultimately be the yardstick against which theories will be measured, not the opinions of some smart but big-headed guys. He goes on to show how they are intimately connected with another, increasingly influential and important idea in modern physics: computational complexity. At the most basic level, in order to say something exists, you must have some essence or another in order to differentiate it from what it is not. It’s meaningless to say “the universe is made of math” because it’s a contradiction in terms in the first place. I was unimpressed by ANKOS. contradictory theories about the way that little and big things behave. Wolfram: When we see a rock fall, we could say either that it’s following a law of motion that makes it fall, or that it’s achieving the “goal” of being in a lower-potential-energy state. For instance he introduces the concept of ‘time as configuration evolution’, where a timeline is a contour of connections between succeeding particular graphs for a given generation rule.