One of the main criticisms of the book, that I’ve come across, is that he’s ‘arrogant’ and gave himself credit for other’s discoveries. The above post contains some relevant info about him deliberately deciding to write the book mostly from ‘his perspective’. Charitably, I think that makes his apparent ‘arrogance’ better understood as something like a ‘literary convention’, especially given the plausibility of him having ‘independently re-discovered’ some of the particular results he reports. (The book itself is about half detailed technical notes, tho still not in a ‘proper’ academic citation style. I can kinda understand why academics would hate that, but it’s frustrating, to me, that that seems to reliably overshadow any real effort to engage with the ideas themselves!)
Here’s another recent post describing his ongoing ‘physics project’ that’s grown out of the work he began and covered in NKS:
I don’t have sufficient technical background to really judge the output of this physics work itself but it stills seem (at least) very intriguing!
In particular, this seems very enticing:
Instead of imagining that the universe follows some particular rule—albeit applying it multicomputationally in all possible ways—what if the universe follows all possible rules?
And then we realized: this is something much more general than physics. And in a sense it’s the ultimate computational construct. It’s what one gets if one takes all the programs in the computational universe that I studied in A New Kind of Science and runs them together—as a single, giant, multicomputational system. It’s a single, unique object that I call the ruliad, formed as the entangled limit of all possible computations.
That seems to me to very much ‘rhyme’ with some arguments for ‘many worlds’ quantum physics, e.g. ‘all the branches are real!’.
Stephen Wolfram’s ideas are under-appreciated
Most of these “ideas” are described and explained in his book “A New Kind of Science” (NKS), available for free on the web:
Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science | Online—Table of Contents
Here’s a (long) recent post describing the rather extraordinary efforts of writing (and publishing) the book:
The Making of A New Kind of Science—Stephen Wolfram Writings
One of the main criticisms of the book, that I’ve come across, is that he’s ‘arrogant’ and gave himself credit for other’s discoveries. The above post contains some relevant info about him deliberately deciding to write the book mostly from ‘his perspective’. Charitably, I think that makes his apparent ‘arrogance’ better understood as something like a ‘literary convention’, especially given the plausibility of him having ‘independently re-discovered’ some of the particular results he reports. (The book itself is about half detailed technical notes, tho still not in a ‘proper’ academic citation style. I can kinda understand why academics would hate that, but it’s frustrating, to me, that that seems to reliably overshadow any real effort to engage with the ideas themselves!)
Here’s another recent post describing his ongoing ‘physics project’ that’s grown out of the work he began and covered in NKS:
Twenty Years Later: The Surprising Greater Implications of A New Kind of Science—Stephen Wolfram Writings
I don’t have sufficient technical background to really judge the output of this physics work itself but it stills seem (at least) very intriguing!
In particular, this seems very enticing:
That seems to me to very much ‘rhyme’ with some arguments for ‘many worlds’ quantum physics, e.g. ‘all the branches are real!’.