[kromem]

It's pretty wild to have gone from watching a lecture from Neil Turok (who is currently my favorite theoretical physicist with a "here's my idea for what physics currently has wrong with its model") and looking at Wolfram's rambling.

Between this and the recent "techno-optimist" rant, I get the sense that maybe we shouldn't give popular voices platforms for things outside the scope that made them famous in the first place, and if they really have something interesting to say, it should be determined as such by the content of its argument and not the pseudo-authority of its author.

Michael Jordon didn't have a stellar baseball record and likely wouldn't have made the cut for a team if he wasn't Michael Jordon. And what I see a lot of these days are people that made a name for themselves metaphorically playing basketball suddenly blogging about baseball and getting way too much attention for what are fundamentally 0.202 batting average ideas.

[globalnode]

As a physics noob i cant really comment on his work too much but as a person: even though he may come across as a bit eccentric... who knows if his ideas may form part of the bigger picture in a hundred years? it seems like he's backing up his ideas with computational examples. (plus i owe him for wolfram alpha when i was learning maths at uni)

[andromaton]

Wolfram has a PhD in physics. *Jordan

[kromem]

Indeed. Here's his dissertation: https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/2597/

Does it maybe read a bit different from the post above?

Roger Penrose has a Nobel Prize in physics. But his consciousness collapse interpretation and "consciousness arises from microtubules" interpretations aren't taken very seriously, nor is his fecund universes cosmology.

And his work on those things is arguably much more rigorous relative to what Wolfram is doing here - but still falls short of what serious theories by serious theoretical physicists involve.

A dissertation extending views of particle physics under the supervision of Feynman is a very different story from reinventing physics 40 years later with the 'superpowers' of your own mathematical language as best expressed by what happens to generative AI rendering a cat in a party hat.

[famouswaffles]

Just accept you made a weird and disingenuous comparison. It doesn't matter what it reads and it doesn't matter what you think of it. So what, a PHD in physics isn't enough to post about theories ? You don't have to believe or like his theories but your Jordan talk makes no sense here.

[kromem]

Did Wolfram spend the 40 years following that PhD in a physics career? Or a math and computer science career kicked off by his interest in cellular automata, which led him initially to his A New Kind of Science and now this?

He didn't play in the major leagues of physics over the past 40 years, and quite a lot has happened since 1980 in that field.

So for him to go from the field where he had meaningful success and spent almost the entirety of his career and adult life to one he'd not been a part of for four decades is very much like Jordan going from basketball to baseball.

It wouldn't really have mattered if Jordan had played baseball in college. It's not where he made a name for himself and the quality of his play when he switched to it after his basketball career was subpar. Just as most physicists find Wolfram's current work: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic...

Sorry you don't find it a good analogy, but I'm pretty happy with it.

[famouswaffles]

Like I said, none of what you've said matters. You do you.

[WhitneyLand]

That doesn’t provide any guarantees that he’s not evolved into, a crank with money.

Looking at Physics historically there are multiple examples of scientists who did productive and fully credible work in their prime and later ended up stuck on crank theories.

[famouswaffles]

It doesn't prove anything. It does make his Jordan comparison disingenuous at best. It's weird enough to gatekeep posting theories (nobody has to believe or even seriously consider them!), even odder to do so for a PhD holder in the field.

[WhitneyLand]

Disagree. It’s not weird at all, and I would say quite productive, being that a billionaire crank is a potentially dangerous, with nearly unlimited ability to attempt to spread his influence countering it requires people to speak up.

[famouswaffles]

By the same token, why should i take anything kromem says with anything but a grain of salt ? What are his credentials ? as far as anyone "being swayed" is concerned, he's a random on the internet. He's not changing minds.

You'll have a much better time telling people how and why those "billionaire crankers" are not making sound arguments than trying to gatekeep what they say. Even then, that's no guarantee.

all in all, the idea that people "speaking up" in this way does anything at all is fairly wishful thinking.

[mensetmanusman]

Nothing in his sentences have to do with being a billionaire. Are we going to accuse him of being a werewolf next Tuesday?

[pigeons]

I followed Jordan's Birmingham baseball run and I thought he showed a lot of promise.