Stephen Wolfram - a theory of everything?

[Alan Grayson]

https://www.pcgamer.com/physicist-stephen-wolfram-thinks-hes-on-to-a-theory-of-everything-and-he-wants-help-simulating-the-universe/

[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, April 17, 2020 at 1:24:12 AM UTC-5, Alan Grayson wrote:

https://www.pcgamer.com/physicist-stephen-wolfram-thinks-hes-on-to-a-theory-of-everything-and-he-wants-help-simulating-the-universe/

Why not? One more into the swamp of theories. (quicksand?)

@philipthrift 

[Terren Suydam]

I love everything about fractals, chaos theory, and so on, and Wolfram's latest idea here seems really rich and potentially highly explanatory.

But let's say he can fairly convincingly say, we found it, this is the hypergraph rule to rule them all, it leads to gravity and quantum mechanics, and so on. The next question would be, well, what's so special about that rule?  What caused that one to be selected among the many to lead to our present universe?  It's the same question we can ask about the null hypothesis: why these physical laws, and not others? Well, one could say, all of them exist somewhere, we just happen to exist in this one (which perhaps is the only one that could support us).

But if it's true that they all (the infinity of them) exist somewhere, we're back in platonia (at least with regard to Wolfram's universes). And if that's the case, the hypergraph iteration is just a program running on the dovetailer. 

Terren

On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 2:24 AM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

https://www.pcgamer.com/physicist-stephen-wolfram-thinks-hes-on-to-a-theory-of-everything-and-he-wants-help-simulating-the-universe/

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[Tomas Pales]

On Friday, April 17, 2020 at 8:24:12 AM UTC+2, Alan Grayson wrote:

https://www.pcgamer.com/physicist-stephen-wolfram-thinks-hes-on-to-a-theory-of-everything-and-he-wants-help-simulating-the-universe/

I see that he uses set theory to define his particular theory of ordered relations. So his "theory of everything" is actually a particular case of set theory. Set theory is also a natural source of ordered/asymmetrical relations because sets form a hierarchy, while in Wolfram's theory the order in a binary relation seems to be an unexplained assumption.