I’m wondering if anyone here has followed the Wolfram Physics Project? If so, what are your thoughts on it? The text in the link is a long-ish read, but well worth it.

When I first heard of this I didn’t think much of it, but I must admit that the idea has really been growing on me. It’s a fascinating approach to a TOE (if one can call it that), and those of you who have known me for a while will notice that it contains many of the elements I have been advocating for some time now, such as chaos/complexity, graph theory etc. And some of the preliminary results are tantalising.

I know this thing isn’t so popular in most of the physics world, but I’m curious to hear what others here think.

Just now, Markus Hanke said:

I’m wondering if anyone here has followed the Wolfram Physics Project? If so, what are your thoughts on it? The text in the link is a long-ish read, but well worth it.

When I first heard of this I didn’t think much of it, but I must admit that the idea has really been growing on me. It’s a fascinating approach to a TOE (if one can call it that), and those of you who have known me for a while will notice that it contains many of the elements I have been advocating for some time now, such as chaos/complexity, graph theory etc. And some of the preliminary results are tantalising.

I know this thing isn’t so popular in most of the physics world, but I’m curious to hear what others here think.

Here is the link, plus some discussion elsewhere

 

https://www.wolframphysics.org/index.php.en

 

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/

 

41 minutes ago, studiot said:

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/

This is the same as the hyperlink in the OP:

Anyway, is this model falsifiable?

16 hours ago, Genady said:

Anyway, is this model falsifiable?

Yes, that’s the big question. The thing with this model is that the underlying discretisation of spacetime has potentially got consequences on larger scales, which can at least be estimated, eg here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02331

So essentially, accretion disks of some black holes would be more luminous than expected from ordinary physics alone. The precise values will depend on the underlying model, which of course hasn’t been finalised.

But the point is that yes, these models make specific predictions that can at least in principle be falsified.

Quote

if you now count the number of points reached by going “graph distance r” (i.e. by following r connections in the graph) you’ll find in these two cases that they indeed grow like r² and r³.

What is a justification of identifying the graph distance with a spatial distance? Is it a postulate of the model?

18 hours ago, Genady said:

 if you now count the number of points reached by going “graph distance r” like here (i.e. by following r connections in the graph) you’ll find in these two cases that they indeed grow like r² and r³. What is a justification of identifying the graph distance with a spatial distance? Is it a postulate of the model?

From your description, the growth of the number of points as 𝑟2 and 𝑟3 hints at two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. This suggests that the graph distance can indeed be interpreted as spatial.

Edited December 11, 20241 yr by DerekV

19 hours ago, Genady said:

What is a justification of identifying the graph distance with a spatial distance? Is it a postulate of the model?

The idea is that space is discretised, ie a geometric volume would consist of a finite number of points (which increases with time), each of which corresponds to a node in the hypergraph. By measuring graph distance, you’d thereby have a measure of how a volume relates to an emerging space’s dimensionality. There’s apparently also a mechanism which ensures that the number of dimensions in the emerging spacetime remains stable after a certain point, but I haven’t fully wrapped my head around the details of that yet.

Does the graph distance depend on observer like the spatial distance does?

20 hours ago, Genady said:

Does the graph distance depend on observer like the spatial distance does?

All observers are themselves a part of the hypergraph, so I don’t think this question is very meaningful. I think the better question to pose is whether SR and GR follow from this framework (ie can you recover the spacetime interval from the hypergraph), and the answer is apparently yes - with the caveat that I haven’t studied the technical details of this, so I don’t know how watertight Wolfram’s derivation actually is.

I should perhaps explicitly state that it isn’t my intention to make any claims as to the viability of this framework - it might well turn out to go nowhere. I merely think it’s a very interesting approach that is worth pursuing further.

3 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

All observers are themselves a part of the hypergraph, so I don’t think this question is very meaningful.

I think, it is. Two observers measure distance between two events. Per the model, they count number of nodes in the graph on the path which connects two events. Do they count different number of nodes?

19 hours ago, Genady said:

I think, it is. Two observers measure distance between two events. Per the model, they count number of nodes in the graph on the path which connects two events. Do they count different number of nodes?

My understanding of this is that in order to measure the graphing distance, you have to first foliate the hypergraph into slices of simultaneity, which is to say you need to have a convention to decide in which sequence the nodes and edges get updated, since in general there’s more than one possibility. Different observes will do this in different ways since they belong to different subgraphs, which is essentially just your ordinary relativity of simultaneity. The graphing distance is then measured within one slice of that foliation only, since we wish to consider spatial length contraction. Thus, even if all observers are part of the same hypergraph, they can still obtain different graphing distances between the same nodes, because they count nodes along different paths within the graph. The graph’s symmetry of causal invariance ensures that the causal structure is always the same, regardless of which sequence the graph gets updated in.

That’s how I understand it anyway. Wolfram’s own explanation of this is found here.

The utility of a scientific theory resides in its empirical content—its capacity to be tested and potentially refuted. A theory that is logically unfalsifiable, or one whose falsification would require experiments that are infeasible in principle or practice, lacks operational significance. In either scenario the theory does not provide an empirically meaningful account of phenomena and therefore cannot play the role required of scientific theories in advancing understanding.

Wolfram’s theory has been criticized as practically unfalsifiable because, while it aims to derive physics from simple computational rules, it has not yet produced unique, precise, and independently testable quantitative predictions that differ from established models. In practice the framework is flexible (many rule choices and interpretive steps), and the proposed observational signatures are often qualitative or lie at unrealistic scales/conditions; that combination makes it easy to accommodate existing data but hard to subject the proposal to a decisive experimental refutation.

Edited September 22Sep 22 by SergejMaterov