"Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics… and It’s Beautiful"

[Exitwound]

Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics… and It’s Beautiful—Stephen Wolfram Writings

How does our universe work? Scientist Stephen Wolfram opens up his ongoing Wolfram Physics Project to a global effort. His team will livestream work in progress, post working materials, release software tools and hold educational programs.

writings.stephenwolfram.com

This theory is so beautiful and simple at it's core, I believe it might be a next step in understanding how everything works.

Don't be intimidated by article's length and terminology, once you start, youc can't stop reading and it's pretty easy to understand if you have some basic knowledge of related sciences.

 

[Loveall]

Yeah, it is a very interesting approach. I have been having a monologue about it in the philosophy section here

Since there is a possibility that the next layer of reality is nested fractal simulations, a computational approach to physics is surely worth a shot.

 

[potnoble]

Thank you very much for posting this.
Very interesting stuff. And making it a world wide project is absolutely
amazing and shows the intentions of those guys.

Thanks again :thumb_up:

 

[Exitwound]

Yeah, it is a very interesting approach. I have been having a monologue about it in the philosophy section here

Oops, missed that one Shall we continue here or move to the other thread?

Since there is a possibility that the next layer of reality is nested fractal simulations, a computational approach to physics is surely worth a shot.

Yes! This paragraph from article struck me as something that I had a "feeling" to be true, even before I have stumbled upon this article:

But even if the size of the hypergraph is always increasing, that doesn’t mean we’d necessarily notice. It could be that essentially everything we can see just expands too—so in effect the granularity of space is just getting finer and finer. This would be an interesting resolution to the age-old debate about whether the universe is discrete or continuous. Yes, it’s structurally discrete, but the scale of discreteness relative to our scale is always getting smaller and smaller. And if this happens fast enough, we’d never be able to “see the discreteness”—because every time we tried to measure it, the universe would effectively have subdivided before we got the result. (Somehow it’d be like the ultimate calculus epsilon-delta proof: you challenge the universe with an epsilon, and before you can get the result, the universe has made a smaller delta.)

 

[xss27]

To be blunt, beautiful is not how I would describe the philosophical conclusions of this theory or the self-aggrandizing statements made throughout the piece (e.g. claiming to know what energy is), though I think it has technical applications possibly. There was a TED talk I watched a long time ago where an architect applied similar thinking by folding a cube using a ratio/logic formula and it created some very abstract forms (he was interested in creating unimaginable forms).

The theory has bias built into the model before he even put pen to paper. This is the exact reason why speculative physics (mathematics), as I've been saying in the other thread, is so dangerous to progress. You do experimentation first, then the mathematics to help explain what you discover, and not the other way round.

It just seems like another outgrowth of the same old tired overly headstrong masculine approach to physics that is not really challenging and examining anything, whilst pulling along all the bias and unchallenged assumptions that have plagued science for so long. For example, the idea that there is a rule, a starting point, from which everything progresses accordingly. Maybe reality doesn't follow that logic? Maybe reality is one motion, a spontaneous motion, with no beginning or end, and maybe the 'laws' are not as fixed as presumed? Maybe there is no logic at all? Maybe there is a creative impulse, a heartbeat, which is dynamic? Not saying that is the case, but if you're going to come up with a grand theory you've got to offer more philosophically than just 'there's a rule and we go from here'.

There's also a blanket acceptance of several current scientific theories and laws in there, like relativity and quantum mechanics, which are just outright accepted as true. All he will do is create a very pretty tapestry of nonsense in the end.

Speculation is great but it really should be kept to a fire circle with friends and mushrooms. If you want to do physics, then you must do physics. This theory is not physics.