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by logtempo
916 days ago
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I'm not an expert at all, but I think the "one model to rule them all" is an sf problem that no serious physicist really work on...because rules are models to describe the universe. Knowing a unique model that match exactly means we are able to know everything about the universe. But how one can know that there is no more phenomena to be discovered, and that all models match exactly ? |
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It's assumed that that must be possible, simply because the universe manages to make it work somehow. But our mathematical models of those two theories aren't fully compatible. That's something that serious physicists definitely think about, although there probably aren't that many working on solving it directly.
The other thing that seems to interest Wolfram is finding fundamental causes - e.g. why gravity exists in the first place, etc. He seems to think that can be derived from his particular rules.
This is something that many physicists deliberately avoid, on the theory that physics is about modeling and predicting what exists, not about explaining why it exists.
It's not really as simple as that - e.g. the examples I gave earlier contradict that idea - but it's certainly the case that many physicists would consider Wolfram's goals to be unscientific in a sense, because it's not likely to be possible to get evidence for claims about why e.g. space or gravity exist. Of course, we can't properly assess that until we see such a claim, which hasn't yet been produced.
Finally, I think you're right that "one model" is never really going to apply. If you look at existing physics there are all sorts of different principles that apply at different scales and to different phenomena, and there are reasons for that. It's only really to address issues like the GR/QM discrepancy that some sort of better compatibility between models is needed.