Wolframs Theory Of The Universe Physics Project Article Review. Wolfram Physics Winter School Jan 4-15, 2021 | Apply now. And as I write this, I have a new idea—of trying to see how relativistic wave equations (like the Klein–Gordon equation for spin-0 particles or the Dirac equation for spin-1/2 particles) might arise from thinking about bundles of geodesics in the multiway causal graph. For new academic publications, see the Wolfram Physics Project.. 1975 (Wolfram is an artist of the eponymous, having named previous products Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language, Wolfram Data Framework, and so on.) And in a sense the understanding is at an even more fundamental level than our models: it’s generic to the whole idea of computational models that follow the Principle of Computational Equivalence and exhibit computational irreducibility. Related to the whole story about spinors, there’s a fundamental result in quantum field theory called the spin-statistics theorem that says that particles with half-integer spins (like electrons) are fermions (and so obey the exclusion principle), while particles with integer spins (like photons) are bosons (and so can form condensates). In any number of dimensions, a rotation is something that takes two vectors rooted at a particular point, and transforms one into the other. And the biggest focus seems to be around “What about peer review?”. But I think in many ways this is at its root a language design problem. All software and visualization tools are based on the Wolfram Language and freely usable. But there’s a critical point here: if a model is simple enough, one can expect that it could somehow be a foundation for many different kinds of things. Then when people look at the reviews, they can filter by these computable facts, essentially deciding for themselves how they want to “review the reviewers”. Do they have the same kind of “no hair” perfection as in general relativity—where only global properties like mass and angular momentum affect how they ultimately look from outside? So in the last couple of weeks I’ve been surprised to see so many people asking us whether we’ve managed to understand the Second Law. No doubt people will point out errors and limitations (including “you should also refer to so-and-so”)—and we look forward to using this input to make everything as good as possible. What’s ultimately the point of peer review? I’m very excited about what’s going to be achieved at the Summer School. OK, so here’s something concrete that came out of our working session last Thursday: I think we understand what angular momentum is. Or they can be turned into stickers or T-shirt designs (or put on mouse pads, if people other than me still use those). doesn’t seem like it’s going to halt with a definite “final result”. Although I’m happy to say that in the case of our project it seems like there are actually a very good number of scientists who are enthusiastically making the effort to understand what we’ve done. MathWorld » The web's most extensive mathematics resource. This phenomenon is ultimately crucial to the derivation of continuum behavior in our models—both for spacetime and for quantum mechanics. Maybe speciation has some correspondence with event horizons. Hunting the Story of Moses Schönfinkel, Enable JavaScript to interact with content and submit forms on Wolfram websites. Wolfram Physics Project Livestreams Watch Project Announcement and Q&A (April 14, 2020) » Wolfram Physics Project Q&A and Working Meetings will be livestreamed as they happen. Things like lattice gauge theory typically involve replacing path integrals by “thermal averages”—or effectively operating in Euclidean rather than Minkowski spacetime. In the last two weeks, we’ve done more than 25 hours of livestreams about the project. We’ve worked hard the last few months to write the best expositions we can, and to make software tools that let anyone reproduce—and extend—everything we’ve done. Essentially it’s about having a whole collection of computing elements that are communicating with others to collectively perform a computation. This is all very much in progress right now, but in the next few weeks we’re expecting to be able to look at well-known quantum algorithms in this context, and see whether we can analyze them in a way that treats time evolution and measurement on a common footing. OK, so what do C, P and T correspond to in our models? Why might there be a connection? A visual summary of Wolfram's theory. It could be that the whole problem is mired in computational irreducibility. But the robust way in which one seems to be able to reason in terms of natural selection suggests to me that—like in physics—there’s some layer of computational reducibility, and one just has to find the right concepts to be able to develop a more general theory on the basis of it. (And kudos to Jonathan Gorard for having had a crucial idea.). And in fact—until a few months ago—that’s exactly how I expected things would go with our Physics Project. Stephen Wolfram announced this project today: , providing a fascinating foundation for a theory of physics. One notable phenomenon that we’ll be looking at is the violation of Bell’s inequality—which is often said to “prove” that no “deterministic” theory can reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics. We don’t yet know how this works in our models. Edges in another direction correspond to space. When we’re talking about quantum mechanics, many important practical phenomena arise from looking at bound states where for example some particle is restricted to a limited region (like an electron in a hydrogen atom), and we’re interested in various time-repeating eigenstates. In principle, this 3D geometry should let one immediately 3D print “universes”. Unlike ordinary momentum, angular momentum is quantized, even in traditional physics. In Q&A sessions that we’ve done, and messages that we’ve received, there’ve been many requests to reproduce a classic quantum result: interference in the double-slit experiment. But what about one that just keeps “evolving” as you try to evaluate it? On the livestream, we started relating this to the tensor Jμν which defines relativistic angular momentum (the two indices of Jμν basically correspond to our two geodesics). People really care! Of course, our theory isn’t “deterministic” in the usual sense. In the working session we had, we started off discussing vector clocks in distributed computing, and realized that they’re the analog of geodesic normal coordinates in physics. We realized that race conditions correspond to branch pairs. But what might the analog of this be in a hypergraph? Reads and writes are just incoming and outgoing causal edges. Then it’s up to us to answer, and hopefully before long consensus will be reached. But not this project. Some of this comes from the working sessions we’ve had; some is in response to questions at our Q&As and some is just the result of my slowly growing understanding—particularly helped by my efforts in explaining the project to people. It seems as if unless we thicken up the connections to the point where they merge into each other, it’s not possible to get enough structural integrity to successfully make a 3D printout with existing technologies. I was surprised it took about a week to get posted, and I was thinking it might have run into some filter that blocks any paper about a fundamental theory of physics—on the “Bayesian” grounds that there’s never been a meaningful paper with such a claim during the time arXiv has been operating. But here are a few that we’re planning on exploring in the next few days, in our livestreamed working sessions. In our models, of course, discretization is not something “imposed after the fact”, but rather something completely intrinsic to the model. The project builds on Wolfram's previous research into computational systems, as explored in his book, A New Kind of Science.The project was launched in April 2020 with the main contributors being Stephen Wolfram, Jonathan Gorard and Max Piskunov. But in general relativity there’s been slow but progressive understanding of other kinds of frames. But what we observe depends on measurements that sample collections of branches determined by the quantum observation frames we choose. First, every reviewer gives information about themselves, and we validate that the person posting is who they say they are. And that means we’re dealing not just with a single rotation, but a whole collection of interwoven ones. The idea is to have an open process, where people comment on our papers, and all relevant comments and comments-on-comments, etc. Or, put another way, once everything is considered to be computational, including both systems and observers, the Second Law is basically inevitable. Our Summer School—which has been running since 2003—is a 3-week program, focused on every participant doing a unique, original project. Instantly share code, notes, and snippets. It’s the right basic idea, but there’s a lot missing from the toy version, which isn’t surprising, not least because it’s based on a simple string substitution system, and not even a hypergraph. And mathematically, that means we’re dealing with so-called spinors, rather than vectors. In traditional continuum general relativity it always seems a bit shocking when there’s some kind of discontinuity in the structure of spacetime. And part of the reason has to do with evaluation orders. The fluid isn’t flowing in a particular direction. There’s a lot to do in the project, and with the project. So over the past week we’ve been thinking about additional, faster things we can do (and, yes, we’ve also been talking to people to get “peer reviews” of possible peer-review processes, and even going to another meta level). (Presumably the reference frames that can be set up are limited by the computational capabilities of observers, which must be compared to the computations being done in the actual evolution of spacetime.) In my own view the fact that Wolfram’s work, on the surface, is free of mathematics just makes it digestible. We’ll be posting the code soon, and we hope other people will help add features. We already did one livestreamed working session about it (with Taliesin Beynon as a guest); we’ll be doing more. But we’ll see. But here’s something from physics: our universe (fortunately!) Hold fast. (By the way, given a network of contacts, the spreading of a contagious disease on it can be thought of as directly analogous to the growth of a geodesic ball in it.). Although for me the notion of seriously using ideas from physics to think about distributed computing is basically less than two weeks old, I’ve personally been wondering about how to do programming for distributed computing for a very long time. Wolfram|Alpha » Explore anything with the first computational knowledge engine. And maybe we’ll be able to see that there’s a limit on the amount of angular momentum a black hole of a given mass can have (as there seems to be in general relativity). Like clustered databases, multiplayer games and trading in markets. Consensus somehow seemed to be the analog of “classicality”, but then there’s the question of how much can be achieved in the “quantum regime”. But my friend Paul Ginsparg (founder of arXiv) tells me there’s nothing like that in place; it’s just a question of deciding on categories and handling hundreds of megabytes of data. In applying our models to physics, a central idea is causal invariance. C, P and T correspond to three potential transformations applied to physical systems. I decided to start by talking about pixels on a screen. (It’s again mathematically complicated, because we’re not intrinsically dealing with integer-dimensional space, so we’ve got to generalize the notion of rotation, rotation groups, etc.). They can be screen backgrounds, or Zoom backgrounds. And of course there’s an open archive both of the livestream itself, and the notebook created in it. A core question in theoretical computing science (which I have views on, but won’t discuss here) is whether P=NP, that is, whether all NP problems can actually be done in polynomial time. (“A livelock is like a closed timelike curve”, etc.) And I’m fully expecting that there’ll be projects at the Summer School that lead, for example, to academic papers that rapidly become classics. We’ve had lots of physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists and others asking questions, making suggestions and offering help. The Wolfram Physics Project is a bold effort to use breakthrough new ideas and the latest in physics, mathematics and computation to find the fundamental theory of physics, often viewed as the ultimate goal in all of science. And over the years essentially all of these 256 cellular automata found uses as models for bizarrely different things (pigmentation, catalysis, traffic, vision, etc.). The Wolfram Physics Project follows the same concept. Here’s what we’ve come up with. Instantly share code, notes, and snippets. We’re at a very exciting point—where there are an incredible amount of “obvious directions” to go. But fortunately, many of the questions have been the same. There’s a lot going on with the Wolfram Physics Project, and we’re expecting even much more, particularly as an increasing number of other people get involved. This year’s Summer School will (for the first time) be online (though synchronous), so it’s going to be easier for students from around the world to attend. The Wolfram Physics Project is a bold effort to use breakthrough new ideas and the latest in physics, mathematics and computation to find the fundamental theory of physics, ... Start your review of A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics. Some features of black holes we should be able to see by looking at ordinary spacetime causal graphs. And it’s working. Most likely there’ll need to be some other layer or variation on the models to make them work. Wolfram Blog » Read our views on math, science, and technology. And in our models this isn’t just some kind of theoretical concept; it’s the whole basis for quantum mechanics. No (classical) computer system can actually do this for any N. So you would need an infinite system. Follow project development as it is livestreamed. The branchial graph defines sibling tasks. In my Mathematica-precursor system SMP, I tried to parametrize this behavior, but realistically nobody understood it. And edges in the third direction correspond to branchial space (i.e. (Our peak so far was nearly 8000 simultaneous viewers, and a fairly technical 2-hour session ended up being watched for a total of more than three-quarters of a million minutes.) Yes, the whole multiway graph is entirely determined by the underlying rule. One feature of our models is that they potentially make it a lot more concrete what’s going on in quantum computing. Stephen Wolfram leads a new approach to discover the fundamental theory of physics. Quantum mechanics is notorious for yielding strange phenomena that can be computed within its formalism, but which seem essentially impossible to account for in any other way. 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