Formal peer review would be a good start. Magnetars: City-Sized Magnets Born from Dying Stars, Astronomers Have Finally Found the Cause of Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts, The Quantum Internet Will Blow Your Mind. However, some physicists are thinking in similar directions like Nobel laureate Gerard t’Hooft who has recently published a cellular automaton interpretation of quantum mechanics. His main finding is that the simplest algorithms can produce huge complexity; some even generate randomness. Ref: A Class of Models with the Potential to Represent Fundamental Physics arxiv.org/abs/2004.08210 The biggest problem in saying “the universe is made of math” is that it’s just a point of view. If our mini universes match the big universe, that seems to fit with While photons are massless and have an unlimited lifetime, W,Z bosons are massive and very short-lived (~10^-25s) so they can only be produced at accelerators. He received his PhD in theoretical particle physics at the age of 20 and was the youngest person in history to receive the prestigious McArthur grant. That shouldn’t matter, but it does. Will we choose to describe their behavior in terms of goals? In the universe, big things and small things But his new sensational claim is that the laws of physics emerge from this complexity, that they are an emergent property of these toy universes. There is a philosophical/ontological problem with the very idea that the universe is computational, which is the same as “Who created God?”. In a network, dimensionality can be measured by applying this fact in reverse. 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. And, once again, he says that applying these simple algorithms repeatedly leads to models — toy universes, if you like — of huge complexity. If not, why not? 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.”. Receive mail from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors. Financially sustainable research is better than science which requires donations to stay So might a carpenter, looking at the moon, suppose that it is made of wood.”. There are many ways of looking at the same phenomenon and it’s not worth looking into the details too much. Language and its ability to simulate this model of the universe. By this way of thinking, relativity and quantum mechanics are different sides of the same coin. “who could demonstrate that they were more intelligent that he is”. The first is whether it is possible to describe how the universe actually is or whether physics is just building models that predict the behavior of the universe to some level of precision. By his calculations, an electron should be composed of about 10^35 of these elements. “Wolfram […] can’t resist trying to apply his experience with digital computer programs to the laws of nature. Mathematical models dominated for three centuries, and in a very short time, program-based models seem to have become the overwhelming favorites for new models. They’re basically just special relativity: asserting that the Universe is symmetric under Poincare transformations. Cleaner Laser Cutting With A 3D-Printed Nozzle, Tiny Ethernet Routers Now Available In Gigabit Speeds, Alfa Romeo Gauge Cluster Gets A Fresh Set Of LEDs, Custom Firmware For Cheap Bluetooth Thermometers. At some point discrete models will have to cover wave functions with their probabilistic nature and the need for complex numbers plus much more. Yes I got that, and agree with you. 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. Like it or not, science is a social endeavor. Dark matter and dark energy are things. Graphs are clearly a good starting point but, although I used to be a fan of cellular automata as a possible approach, I am concerned that they treat time separately from space which makes it difficult to incorporate General Relativity in their models. Is "Social Science" an Oxymoron? What the heck kind of comment is this? It’s obtuse to think that the universe is actually made of math and not simply described by math just as it is to think the universe is made of hypergraphs and not simply described by hypergraphs. like the inside of a computer, and computers often serve as mini universes of Engineering use though? Stephen Wolfram just presented a new fundamental theory for how the universe works that claims to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity. The objectivity of the laws of physics are pretty much injected by fiat. But… the whole theory might also just turn out to be useless (in a practical application sense): Even if you did figure out exactly which rule set leads to our exact universes (or at least, all those with exactly matching physical behaviour), you might never be able to actually apply it to any practical problem, just because it is so compute-inefficient that you could never build a big enough computer to make any usefully detailed simulation practical. Wolfram has, at this very early stage, provided non-maddening if yet incomplete explanations for what happens at the event horizon and within a black hole, what dark matter might be, and why the cosmological constant isn’t necessary in Einstein’s equations. 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. Once again, Wolfram has studied the properties of simple algorithms; this time ones that are a little different to cellular automatons, but which he says are as minimal and structureless as possible. I guess when we argon it will reveal that place. What does it predict? 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. We now know—as a result of Gödel’s theorem, computational irreducibility, etc.—that there are limits to the scientific questions that can be resolved. There was a problem. unity was void Maybe that down at the Planck scale we’d find a whole civilization that’s setting things up so our universe works the way it does. We’re pretty good at manipulating Photons. that claims to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity. Similarly, consider the basic fact of the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe. We recently had the following email exchange.–-John Horgan. That's the ultra-simplified explanation, at least—Wolfram and his colleagues have released hundreds of pages on their theory. New York, 38:58 – Sunburn moment with Wolfram Alpha 39:46 – Computational irreducibility 46:45 – Theory of everything 52:41 – General relativity 1:01:16 – Quantum mechanics 1:06:46 – Unifying the laws of physics 1:12:01 – Wolfram Physics Project 1:29:53 – Emergence of time 1:34:11 – Causal invariance