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Towards a new kind of science and technology (scottlocklin.wordpress.com)
20 points by surprisetalk on Dec 22, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments


I feel like I'm in a parallel universe where Stephen Wolfram doesn't exist. But he does, he's a living legend, and his seminal work, A New Kind of Science, and its core concepts, computational equivalence and computational irreducibility, are the answers you're looking for here.

For more up-to-date thoughts on thermodynamics I'd start here: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/computational-fo...


Many in the physics profession don't take him as seriously as they probably should. Part of it is Wolfram's tendencies to make grandiose claims about his work before it pans out, which inoculates against belief even when the work does show promise.

His current work with "the Ruliad" and the hypergraph model of all possible rules is actually interesting. Whether it will yield results as a framework for finding a TOE; who knows? (It helps that the hypergraph edges have no physical length, which means Lorentz contraction and continuous space can still be modeled. It does seem to require discrete time, relative to some starting node, though. Could just be my limited understanding.)

Also, his derisive term for people who think in terms of computation is likely a back-handed reference to Wolfram.


To throw shade without directly showing where Wolfram goes wrong is pathetic. This blog reads like a post about basketball in the 90s that doesn't mention Michael Jordan, titled "Bull in a China Shop".


Ambitious title.

The key idea seems to come from this 1995 paper.[1] Here's a later paper.[2] None of them get far enough to tie this to real world experimental results, It's all descriptive math at this point, as the original article points out. But maybe someday someone will make further progress and understand turbulence or something.

Anybody understand this?

[1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1995RvMP...67..605R/abstra...

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.5443


Overly aggressive use of the term “computard” is at best unserious and at worst deeply offensive.


Wait till you see the rest of the blogs opinions




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