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by TheEzEzz
971 days ago
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I'm sympathetic to your take on how overly grandiose the language is, but I also think you're being too harsh here. The idea that the universe is discrete/computational is a fine idea, but underspecified and useless on its own. There's an infinite array of computable rules to choose from. But the fact that with a few assumptions on the rules you can then limit to both GR and QM is very non-trivial and, in my opinion, pretty surprising. To your point, does it prove that this is _the_ correct theory? Definitely not, and metering language around the claims is important. Still, the result feels novel, surprising, and worthy of further investigation, alongside the other popular models being explored. I think it's a shame that Wolfram's demeanor turns people off from the work. |
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Perhaps you're not familiar with the literature here, but GP isn't exaggerating, using e.g. Noether's Theorem you can derive the expected laws of physics from very simple symmetry principles. This means that any model with these symmetries will produce these behaviours.
If you make up a new model of Newtonian mechanics that doesn't depend explicitly on time, so that your laws are the same tomorrow as today, then it's proven that such a model will conserve "energy". You could point at this as an indication of the correctness of your theory, but it's really unavoidable. You can play a similar trick for the fundamental forces if you have the patience to work through the derivation.
A better test is these models is if they're predictive, and I haven't seen a such a result about this CA-physics outside of Wolfram's blog.