The phrase 'a new kind of science' is a huge red flag, but apart from this I don't think I can evaluate what I'm reading.
Does the article make any sense? Does it at least hint at a useful direction?
Or is this a case of someone holding a hammer (the language) and seeing everything as a nail (how the universe works)?
It doesn't pass the smell test. I'll be very diplomatic and say this to our high school and undergrad readers: Mathematica is a lovely program, but working for this man on this project will not do good things for your scientific career.
Among the many many many red flags, Wolfram claims to have discovered that complexity can emerge from simple rules in the early 80's. This is a full decade after P. W. Anderson's seminal paper [More is Different](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393).
It's the paper that established "emergent phenomena" as an interesting and viable field of inquiry. When you understand it, it changes the way you think about the world.
It's more fundamental than automata papers, so of course it doesn't address automata, but automata papers should reference it.
"A New Kind of Science proposed ideas that were not new, were not kind, and were not science. Discuss."
I am also put off by his self-obsession, but it is also true that I discovered how complexity can emerge from simple rules in the 90's.
Like wolfram, I was not first, but I did discover it.
Stephen Wolfram is well known in the industry as being a pompous, self-indulgent man. There was an old joke I heard which went:
> Q: How do you know if Stephen Wolfram invented something?
> A: He'll tell you.
I saw a TED talk by Conrad Wolfram about using Mathematica as an educational tool [1]. I went to one of my tutorials and tried to discuss it with the Professor (we were encouraged to bring up basically anything we'd seen or encountered in our first few weeks of uni). His response was "I don't think we need to worry about what Conrad Wolfram is saying."
By all accounts, Stephen and Conrad Wolfram are clever men. It is without a doubt that Mathematica is an extraordinary piece of software. Many people here will have benefitted from Wolfram Alpha and will have used Mathematica either in an academic context or in an engineering context.
Stephen Wolfram, however, is not Christ, even though he likes to think so.
That may be true, but science is full of pompous, self-indulgent men who make brilliant discoveries. Of course, science is also littered with cranks who make grandiose claims of discovery - especially in physics.
Curious to hear what people who actually study this stuff think about this supposedly discovery.
The thing is, Wolfram earned his stripes as a very competent physics prodigy, and is clearly very, very smart. But as far as I can tell, no one studies this stuff except him and hist acolytes and I think few established physicists would be inclined too, so it's very difficult to evaluate his ideas.
Is he a crank? For a classic definition of crank, no. Does this work represent a clearer understanding of physics than we had prior, or is it an interesting diversion? Harder question, but one has to assume, probably diversion.
On the other hand if time travel or teleportation IS ever invented, my money is that it will be Wolfram.
If I have to read through so much of the article context disguised as bragging without anything resembling something new then maybe this Fundamental Theory is less important than Stephen Wolfram showing how many Important Things he's done
Stephen Wolfram: his physics might be completely unproven, but his blog posts stand as conclusive evidence that shameless self-promotion has no upper bound.
Ah this line I think summarises everything perfectly:
>As the saying goes, there is much here that is new and true, but what is true is not new, and what is new is not true; and some of it is even old and false, or at least utterly unsupported.
One of the important things he’s done was ruin math for me, which was a shock because I did not think that was even possible.
His company was running accelerated calculus experiments at universities built around Mathematica. There’s a reason your teacher doesn’t want you using a graphing calculator for your algebra homework. I know that now.
Ever since I’ve been carrying around a block of salt for Mr Wolfram and get a lot of schadenfreude out of him showing what a mad scientist he is.
Does anyone remember that self obsessed book he wrote about fifteen years back? Hell I can’t even remember the title. Sure changed the world, didn’t it.
He's genuinely smart and genuinely looking into an underexplored branch of theory with tons of upside potential, but he also does... this sort of thing, all the time.
Based on this image alone, having not yet read the article, it looks like he’s taken his prior insights on cellular automata (Conway’s Game type stuff) and advanced them forward to quarks and Feynman diagrams.
I typically have a very rough time with Wolfram’s writing but the image is, at least, simple enough to follow. “What are the rules for particle timeflows?” is certainly a question that’s interesting though my phrasing is probably terrible.
EDIT: Yup, it’s definitely quarks X cellular automata. Clearly an extension of previous Wolfram work, still just as enthusiastic / savior-ish as ever. I hope it pans out somehow in pragmatic real world outcomes someday. Bonus link to diagram showing a fate decision tree behaving like a Conway glider:
“What if the causality that led to the universe can be modeled using a form of Conway’s Game of Life automata built on Feynman diagrams?”
Note that I have no idea if Wolfram is right or not, but I’m glad I tried and failed to read New Kind of Science years ago. The mindset/approach were worth it and make it possible to follow along with today’s post.
Interestingly this mirrors other disciplines. Consider for example Schelling's model of segregation in social science, which is (probably not by accident) very similar to cellular automata.
Just a few years laters, people quickly translated this to graphs - a network. The spacial interpretation aside, the idea surely should hold for higher dimensional social relations.
And that's where we reach and interesting point that Wolfram writes about: These system are useful, as long as we can calculate or derive a state. If all we can do is simulate it, then it's much less useful.
And indeed, creating such models is the true "art".
So while the "idea" of using relations and hypergraphs lays a foundation that I am sympathetic to, I also feel like the things "on the to do list" are, indeed, the meat of the issue.
I am not a physicist but as a layman there are two interesting things that my mind (which admittedly finds connections in things that others don't) thought of while reading the article:
1) Conway has obviously been in the news recently (RIP) and there have been quite a few articles talking about his "Game of Life". The fact that complex patterns emerge from three basic rules seems eerily similar to what Wolfram is now describing. Of course, computational power is now to the point where you can run many more games that we could the first time I entered the program into my Z80-based machine.
2) There's also been a lot of discussion the last couple years about whether we're living in a simulation. With Wolfram performing "zillions" of operations, could it be that there's actually someone living inside his computer wondering the same thing? As we progress in our computing ability, could this happen in the future? If we ourselves are living in a simulation, could those simulating us also be living in a simulation? Is it also turtles all the way up?
1) Yep. Universe is built on few very simple principles, which can be used to implement emulation: dimensions, energy/force, inertia/mass, time. (And infinity).
2) Yep, it will happen in future, but infinity is not possible in simulation.
I wonder if this is in response to Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity presentation he did on April 1st.
Yesterday, on Lex Fridman's podcast, he mentioned how since he revealed his theory there wasnt any feedback from scientific community. BTW, highly recommend watching Eric's Portal.
I would love to see thorough, detailed analysis and critique of Weinstein's Geometric Unity theory and the latest version of Wolfram's cellular automata-like theory of reality. (Weinstein still needs to put up a formal paper, though.)
At the time of writing this comment, the majority of responses here are just calling the guy a pompous crank, rather than pointing out specific issues with the central claims of the proposal. Funny that this is on the website created by the guy who proposed the Hierarchy of Disagreement [0]. There are many comments with valid critiques, but so far there are more of the other kind.
Yeah, Wolfram and Weinstein have some eccentricities, and the intro section to this is kind of unnecessary and grating and could probably be cut out, but they're also very intelligent people who have discovered and created things which are both "new and true" (and/or new and useful) rather than merely "true or new, mutually exclusively" as people like to snidely parrot.
I'm not saying this theory or Weinstein's theory aren't necessarily irreparably riddled with holes. Just that the nature of the criticism often seems bizarre, poor quality, and directed at their personalities rather than their content, like in this comment section. It'd be much more refreshing to see it be criticized on its merits rather than its tone or the personality traits of its author.
Anybody who has coded Game of Life can draw a parallel to this. Simple rules can lead to arbitrarily complex systems. I'm all on board with this concept. Graph theory is amazing and useful in many ways we don't understand yet. I'm all on board with this concept as well.
But a graph has nodes and edges. Nodes, in this case, can be particles.. I guess? But what are the edges? When a "simple rule" is applied to a collection of particles, what is the force that connects them after the interaction? I read some of the material in detail and skimmed some of the rest, but there was a lot of setup and cool graph visualizations and not a lot speaking to this core question.
Disclaimer: I'm not a theoretical physicist but I have read "Quantum Physics for Babies" at least 50 times.
Yep. A whole lot of this is "Automata are relevant! I'm relevant!" and some hand-waving and "Doesn't this loooook like a mesh? See! We made space-time!"
With respect, I don't think that our derivation of the conformal structure of spacetime, or of the Einstein field equations in the continuum limit of infinite causal graphs, is "hand-waving". See, for instance:
I've just read it based on your recommendation. I enjoyed it but I don't find that it obviates Wolfram's work, or even overlaps with it much at all (and I'm no big Wolfram fan).
Still not done reading, but in this representation, particles are stable shapes in the successive steps of the hypergraph (e.g. like gliders and other stable shapes in Game of Life).
I don't know anything about Wolfram's theory, but if it were me to create a graph theoretical foundation for Physics then nodes would be events, and maybe edges would be particles. Very Feynman-graph-like.
After a few iterations, I think I understand the point of this piece. It was a bit difficult to hone in on, though.
The article suggests that working out the theory of something like rule production systems, and then figuring out how that theory relates to existing insights from physics, is the best path toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics.
My primary source of skepticism stems from the fact that the theory of rule production systems is not exactly a new area of study. It's been well-developed at various points in time and from various perspectives by the theoretical CS, programming language theory, automated theorem proving, and mathematical logic communities. That theory addresses most of Stephen's "big difficult questions" about the non-physics side of things. For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a very old and extremely well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory.
I sympathize with Stephen. In fact, he sounds a bit like I did early in my scientific career. Unfortunately, though, I just don't see how these old well-understood ideas from computer science are going to result in a new fundamental theory of physics.
Have ideas from computer science had significant reach inside theoretical physics before? It seems like physics has only recently discovered its love-affair with information theory, but information theory had existed for a long time before quantum information theory became a hot area of study. Maybe what's new here are not the ideas themselves, but bringing them into an area of study that hasn't payed attention to them before.
Maybe. I doubt it, though. There has always been substantial cross-talk between CS/information theory and Physics. Even through the 1990s it was difficult to be a computer scientist without eventually coming into contact with a non-trivial number of physicists. Especially in industrial research labs. Bell Labs, PARC, and IBM Research were full of physicists. Bell Labs and PARC are dead, but AFAIK IBM Research still has a bunch of physicists and the newer kids on the block (Google Research, FAIR, Deepmind, Microsoft Research, Intel, AMD) also have a share of physicists.
Besides, Stephen's approach here is to ignore 15-20 years of research from various CS sub-communities; his best case scenario is spending a decade reinventing that wheel. The problem with cross-talk that isn't "humble on both sides" is that it's either a) a waste of time because one side's ideas aren't that important, or else b) a waste of time because one side has to reinvent the other wise.
I really think that cross-domain concepts are almost the only way to make huge leaps, so that's a precondition in my mind for any advancement. Check.
In terms of "humility on both sides", it's such a common theme that this oft-cited assumption is taken as truth. Some of the greatest minds who had the most impact in our history were also insufferable assholes, who were stubborn and would not yield until people were forced to reckon with their ideas. Is this me defending Wolfram's ideas? No. But it's me defending the idea that "humility and civility" as a prerequisite for scientific advancement seems false, and in fact, in stagnant fields, the need for a disruptive personality who happens to be right may be perhaps the only real way out of the rut.
Sure. The problem here is that exactly the ideas he's proposing to explore have already been explored. I've slightly edited my previous comment to point this out.
The problem, in the very particular case of this blog post, is that the cost for lacking intellectual humility is spending time reinventing other people's wheels. And those wheels won't get him as far as he thinks they will. We know because they've already been built by others.
That makes sense. I can't assess your argument given my lack of understanding. In my own experience though, deriving things from first principles, even if they've been re-invented countless other times, is a good way to build up the intellectual super structures necessary to think new thoughts.
I think we should separate:
- Wolfram acting as though he thought of the ideas first
- Wolfram being underinformed so as to undermine his own progress
People typically get bent out of shape on the former, which is in evidence, and is a problem of politics. The latter, we can't prove or disprove unless you see him drawing significant conclusions that are falsifiable via current understanding. If that is the case, then I'll yield. But I suspect Wolfram may be more well read than he lets on, but for whatever reason, has a dysfunctional personality trait where he sees his own wrangling with ideas already put forth as a form of authorship, when he incorporates it into his long chain of analysis that he's been doing for decades. A potential analogy is one of "re-branding" - but in this case it's re-branding as part of an internal narrative, one where in the final chapter, Wolfram sees himself as the grand author of the unified theory. In that mental model, each idea he draws from is not one he cobbles together into a unified form, but instead, ideas he incorporates and reinterprets in his own bespoke system and methods, leading him to forget that the core ideas are not his own. (I'm definitely reaching here, but trying to to highlight how the two things above could be in fact very materially divergent and consistent with the evidence.)
> Wolfram [is] acting as though he thought of the ideas first.
This is called plagiarism. Independent reinvention is no defense if you keep on acting as though you had the idea first. He has already been informed many times that parts of his work are not original, and his behavior doesn't change.
And he knows it, on some level. He made the decision to communicate his "discoveries" in press releases and self-published books. He knows he's not subjecting himself to peer review. He may know, on some level, that his work couldn't pass it. He sued one of his employees to prevent him (the employee) from publishing a proof that Wolfram claimed he had discovered in his book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110
I understand what you're up to in trying to invent a psychology that explains his bad behavior, but at some point you have to withdraw empathy and think pragmatically about consequences. Wolfram's actions are already more than sufficient to disgrace an ordinary academic. He's damaged at least one career that we know of. He tries to pass himself off as a visionary scientist only he never delivers. If he wasn't independently wealthy no one would be listening to him at all. But non-experts do listen, which is precisely why speaking up against pseudoscience is part of every real scientist's professional responsibilities. Rather than spin these theories, it would be a better use of your time to send Stephen some email urging him to stick to working on Mathematica.
> He sued one of his employees to prevent him (the employee) from publishing a proof that Wolfram claimed he had discovered in his book.
The wikipedia article claims that Wolfram conjectured rule 110 in 1985 many years before Cook. Out of curiosity, do you have any info that disputes this?
I've read Wolfram's Wikipedia page. It doesn't contain a single word about the controversy that surrounds him and that is in evidence in this discussion thread. On the page for his book, A New Kind of Science, all the allegations of academic dishonesty, which to working scientists is probably more important than the contents of his work -- assigning credit for discoveries is how they get paid, after all -- has been compressed down to a single paragraph at the very end. And that paragraph contradicts itself on a sentence-by-sentence basis, first blaming Wolfram, then excusing him, then blaming him again and so on. So it seems that someone has been pretty successful -- more successful than not -- at erasing criticism of Wolfram from his Wikipedia presence. Therefore, I think Wikipedia's claim that he invented rule 110 in 1985 is highly suspect.
That doesn't matter much, though. Academics have a lot of ways to deal with priority disputes. Sometimes they author a paper together. Sometimes they each publish separately in the same issue of one journal. That's what happened when Darwin and Wallis simultaneously developed the theory of evolution. Sometimes, if the first discoverer was much earlier than the second, the second author might publish the work, and make a public statement in the paper saying the first author was first. This is what happened when Claude Shannon invented information theory only to learn that Norbert Wiener had done the same thing twenty years before. If Wolfram had documentation of his claim, some compromise could probably have been worked out.
Instead, it's a matter of public record that he sued Cook, alleging that the knowledge that Cook had done the work was a trade secret of Wolfram Research. I said before that scientists get paid by correctly being assigned credit for their discoveries. Suing to prevent a scientist from taking credit for their research is like armed robbery. There had been some grumbling before, but this was the moment when scientists recognized that Stephen Wolfram was Not A Real Scientist Anymore.
What if sometimes reinventing the wheel is in fact the efficient procedure and "humility" has nothing to do with it? Simultaneous discoveries and rediscoveries are something rather common. Rather than getting familiarized with some literature and, consequently, getting also tangled with the problems peculiar to how the literature has developed, maybe a fresh start from a different approach is sometimes preferable.
Yes, for example, it took Lagrange reinventing classical mechanics using the principle of least action to put physics in a spot where quantum mechanics and general relativity could be seen.
To be fair, both quantum mechanics and general relativity were first "seen" without the aid of the Lagrangian. (Not to dismiss its role in later developments.)
> For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a very old and extremely well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory.
Can you go into a little more detail about the other versions of these ideas? What are they called in other theories?
I don’t understand how this model can ever be predictive. It seems like a good way perhaps to create an approximation engine but I’m not sure what sort of predictive insights you can gain from this approach.
In order to be useful, this model should either create a new testable prediction or speed up computations in existing models while retaining accuracy. It seems to be in the latter camp. I would like to understand more about why this model is more computationally efficient.
Perhaps there’s more work to be done on the process of generating rules or limiting the types of rules. Arbitrarily choosing rules to create properties that look similar to observed physical properties doesn’t seem to point to a fundamental theory.
I think Wolfram makes the point himself that the model may not directly be predictive in the way that states "encrypt" their predecessors. I guess the best bet is to show that there is a direct connection between his model and higher models, because then you can start to look for physical manifestations of things his lower-level model predicts that don't exist in higher-level models. Kind of like how GR keeps getting reinforced by verifying its predictions with phenomena that hadn't been considered before its advent.
>For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a very old and extremely well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory.
> For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a very old and extremely well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory.
What are the names for these old, well-studied things in programming language theory, so we can look them up?
Oy, I've been dreading having to answer this question since I pressed "post" :)
I've decided that I do not have the time or interest in writing the Related Work section for a paper-length blog post touching on an enormous number of fields, some of which I know well and some of which I haven't thought about in a decade. (As an aside, one real and substantive problem with trying to build a research program without taking the time to share a survey and comparison with related work is that you'll have difficulty communicating with others. It will then take extra effort on others' part to build up a knowledge base. Surveying and comparing to related work is hard and thankless but important work. It's not about credit, it's about building up a shared knowledge base.)
However, I can spare an hour or two and take the time to flesh out one or two in order to demonstrate what I mean.
So, I'll make the following offer: is there any particular excerpt from Stephen's blog post to which you would like the CS/PL/info theory analogue? Or, would you prefer me to pick a particular sentence and identify the body of work that explores that question and the major results of that body of work? (I will take this opportunity to emphasize the "about the non-physics side of things" portion of my original post.)
I'm going to link to this thread in other places where people have asked this question instead of monitoring 3 or 4 different threads going forward. I'll do my best to occasionally monitor this thread for requests and do my best to reply. FYI, I probably won't get around to answering more than one reply until the weekend.
I would like the PL theory analogue of "emulation cones" and "rulial space" please :)
If these concepts don't have a single name that you can just rattle off, and that we can Google - if describing them in terms of existing theory would take serious effort - then surely identifying and naming them is a major contribution?
PL theory is a bit of a hobby of mine, but I don't really see an exact equivalent to what Wolfram seems to be describing. His rules are like rules in a term rewriting system, but the rules of rulial space are permitted to change so they may be more expressive, perhaps like a higher-order rewrite system.
Earlier you wrote 'For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a very old and extremely well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory.'
I don't understand how things could be extremely well studied and developed, but also not exist in some fashion where you could just name and link to it in a matter of minutes rather than hours. Example "emulation cones are called X here".
I've listened to Wolfram and skimmed one of his books before deciding he's beyond my ability to evaluate as genius or crackpot. I'd love to be able to nail down a specific thing where I could read about some existing topic and then read about Wolfram claiming to reinvent it or something, because that could help me learn towards one conclusion over the other in the genius versus crackpot consideration.
One frustrating thing that I often find is that much of Wolfram criticism is non-specific and as it's impossible for me to bucket Wolfram I can't bucket his critics either because they tend not to provide enough detail or clarity.
The question you're asking requires non-trivial effort to answer precisely because "emulation cone" and "rulial space" are never quite all the way defined, and the question being asked in terms of these definitions is also left a big vague.
Emulation cones go by various names, but perhaps the most common is the (bounded) reflexive and transitive closure of a reduction rules of a system. Another common name is the (bounded) reachable set.
Rulial spaces, by which I mean the particular ones Stephen seems interested in toward the end, are higher order term rewriting systems or higher order syntax. But actually, rulial space is used throughout the text in a much more general sense. I'd consider even very canonical results from PL theory, e.g. confluence of rewriting, to be non-trivial observations about a particular rulial space.
The reason for giving (or at least very vaguely hinting at) a definition for rulial spaces and emulation cones is to talk about foliations and then expressiveness. There's some connection between foliation and bisimulation that's difficult to exactly nail down, because nailing it down requires a lot more precision about the exact sort of (emulation cones we are interested in and for which) spaces. The connection between expressiveness and complexity hierarchies is immediately obvious, I think, right?
> One frustrating thing that I often find is that much of Wolfram criticism is non-specific and as it's impossible for me to bucket Wolfram I can't bucket his critics either because they tend not to provide enough detail or clarity.
Oy, no good deed goes unpunished :)
Look, I get why it's frustrating.
But, really, there's a reason that rule #0 of technical writing is to define terms before using them. The reader can only do so much.
Specifically just looking for a brief explanation of this line:
>For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a very old and extremely well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory.'
What's the old well-studied idea, and the well-developed programming theory idea? A one sentence reply is fine.
The idea of defining a set of transition rules and then analyzing the properties of some closure (e.g., think reflexive and transitive) of those rules. For transition rules of various orders, expressiveness, etc. And then stepping back and realizing that's what you're studying and generalizing it by thinking rigorously about the relationships between those systems and so on. That's really pretty much then entire modus operandi of a huge chunk of PL research, and there's a ton of mathematical and actual technology built up for doing so. The algorithms that are core components of Stephen's "standard library" for this project scratch the surface.
I'm interested in research direction of using code-data dual algothms that modify each other and form natural selection process to formally abstract notion of evolutional open-endedness (like Turing completeness is an abstraction of algorithms notion). More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalPhilosophy/comments/dzghec/o...
Maybe you could advise some developed language or model for this task? The interesting part is to have code-data duality and enough rich language to kick start natural selection that would produce competing algorithms that would gradually become more and more complex (and gradually become closer to sentience).
Though the language might not even be Truring complete as it is. As natural assumption would be that the model should be finite in resources and it can get access to infinite time or memory only in time limit (assuming that the individual algorithms would survive for this to happen).
Scott Aaronson said basically this ending his review of NKS:
"However, were the book more cautious in its claims and more willing to acknowledge previous work, it would likely be easier for readers to assess what it does offer: a cellular-automaton-based perspective on existing ideas in science"
Only skim-read the article.
What seems to be lacking are any testable predictions of this theory, or something like derivations of existing measured constants that one would think you would get from a fundamental theory of physics.
It would be nice that instead of a press release and a long diatribe with fancy graphics, he took the boring but hard step of publishing a paper that advances the field and getting accolades from fellow physicists who agree with him.
Wolfram's press release focused method of advancing his "scientific advances" is so off putting, and highly suspicious that it is more hype that really something new.
OK, so how does it all work? I’ve written a 448-page technical exposition (yes, I’ve been busy the past few months!). Another member of our team (Jonathan Gorard) has written two 60-page technical papers. And there’s other material available at the project website. But here I’m going to give a fairly non-technical summary of some of the high points.
I wonder if this hapless postdoc-equivalent is going to get sued, too!
What Wolfram is saying, and has always said, is vacuous in the extreme. There is more new science in 't Hooft's book about Quantum Mechanics as Cellular Automata than in all of A New Kind of Science.
His stuff just amounts to large claims and a lot of fiddling around. Its certainly possible that something could come out of it (I mean the idea "physics is just some rules" is vacuously true) but I don't see in any of the work surrounding his ideas any true attempt to get to the bottom of things by trying very hard to understand basic ideas like locality and unitarity and how they must be true or may be violated by physical models which are deeper than the ones we have.
If you want to see that kind of actual hard scientific work, see Nima Arkani Hamad or Gerard 't Hooft.
I, personally, was a bad researcher, which is why I couldn't cut it as an academic. What made me bad was that I got lost in fiddling around rather than trying to hit the most incisive questions in the most useful ways. I see a lot of that in Wolfram.
Graph grammars are Turing complete so I don't see why they couldn't express the fundamental theory of physics, but it seems like a weird way of going about the problem.
Yes. Superdeterminism does away with the observer as a separate thing, so the question of free will doesn't even come up. Everything is just one evolving system.
Yup, "unpredictability" or more precisely computational irreducibility is when things tend to get interesting... and this happens deterministically just fine.
I'll just say it, I love Stephen Wolfram. The fact he gets under so many peoples' skins, and yet keeps leading teams producing amazing stuff (Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language, etc) gets an A+ in my book. Anyone who puts so much energy into this stuff, which such ego, obviously wants to contribute in a real and meaningful way to ensure his own understanding and his legacy. A personality flaw? Sure. But we've seen bigger assholes make huge dents in the universe - physics is long overdue for someone to shake things up. From my vantage point, as a laymen, theoretical physics is dead, and its a shame. It may take someone like Wolfram to do it - it probably takes flipping the bird to peer review at this point to get widespread dissemination of radical takes on theoretical physics. And it certainly seems like a lot of radical takes will be necessary for us to actually make progress.
So, hats off. Even if this isn't the Big Idea, maybe it'll end up sparking an idea in someone else's head down the road that gets us there.
I'm genuinely not sure why you believe this especially as we live in an era when theoretical physics and experimental physics are becoming so entwined and the product is a fairly successful testing of our models of physics.
I believe it because it seems to be the consensus I gather whenever I read articles about theoretical physics' hunt for the unified theory. I'm talking about that problem specifically. The search for the unified theory sounds basically dead, and we have a generation of physicists who have spent their careers going down dead ends. The meme seems to be for the field to move past it and focus on more "productive" areas of physics that can have practical use.
I can only gather this from 2nd hand accounts in pop-sci articles and mainstream physics books, but the lack of falsifiability and experimentalism for these things, combined with a large surface area of failed attempts, seems to have left physics in a rut.
Sure, theoretical high-energy physics (i.e. particle physics) seems to be in somewhat of a dead end when it comes to finding a theory of everything. But this is an incredibly small part of theoretical physics.
It's not dead in the sense that we've done a better job of experimentally confirming things like general relativity and aspects of quantum mechanics, due to being able to accurately perform more precise observations (like with LHC and LIGO). I'd say this is a triumph of advances in experimental physics, though, rather than theoretical physics.
There doesn't seem to have been any widely accepted fundamental theoretical breakthrough like general relativity or quantum mechanics for a long time, nor has there been any widely accepted way to unify the two theories. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the impression I and many others have.
This is pure speculation on my part so take it for a grain of salt. But I generally don't find that fields just stop advancing or go cold. It seems to me that usually what is happening is there is a lot of work going on at a level that does not make a lot of sense to report to a lay audience or at leas the media which covers the subject does not think a lay audience could understand or would be interested in it.
Co Sider biology. What is the last major biology idea that made a huge public splsh? DNA? The human genome sequence? But are biologists stuck the world round? Of course not there have been hundreds if not thousands of notable biology findings in the past 20 years.
Theoretical physics probably simply appears stuck to us because as lay people we focus on a couple of large scale questions that for now are probably out of reach. But we don't consider the hundreds of theoretical physics refinements and observations that need to go into the development of the LHC or LIGO or James Webb etc.
True, there probably have been some important refinements, but part of the issue is that a lot of that work has been done along very long, sometimes many-decades long, paths that so far have had zero experimental validation.
Basically, people have been building giant ladders and constantly improving them, but we don't know if any of the ladders were put up against the right wall. We have no idea if these theories actually correspond to reality or not. For example, string theory and supersymmetry.
The LHC was created partly with the goal and expectation of detecting particles that would validate supersymmetry, but so far it hasn't, and many are beginning to believe the theory may be flawed or wrong. In some sense that is a bit of a theoretical advancement, but so far, supersymmetry theorists don't appear to have a popular alternative they're considering instead. If they fail to find evidence for it in the next 10 or so years, it's probably just a total dead end. And string theory has been at it for even longer.
> Co Sider biology. What is the last major biology idea that made a huge public splsh? DNA? The human genome sequence? But are biologists stuck the world round? Of course not there have been hundreds if not thousands of notable biology findings in the past 20 years.
Human genome editing using CRISPR-Cas9 a few years ago was pretty big tbh.
I feel the same way. His book A New Kind of Science (the first chapters) have been revolutionary.
I think his work will lay down the foundations of science for centuries to come.
It is curious though. Nearly every criticism I’ve read hasn’t grappled with his ideas—just the man, out of insecurity and ego.
And he’s a lovely writer. I don’t sense ego from him. Just honesty about the work he’s done and contributed. You read him and get the sense his prose is calm—like light particles flowing down a river.
His stories about the remarkable scientists he’s met is some of the best writing I’ve ever read.
One potential archetype for him that is consistent is he simply cannot recognize these political concerns. Many of us feel anxiety about the idea we may be interpreted as stepping on peoples' work, or failing to recognize their efforts and how they may have led to our own advancement. It may be that Wolfram, for whatever reason, simply doesn't have that - not out of malice, but just as a core deficiency in his ability to empathize. Any person like that would be viewed as a bull in a china shop, even if everything they wrote never directly attacked or diminished others - and that seems to be the case here. The problems people have with Wolfram are problems of "insult by omission" or "implicit bragging" - not about things that are on the page, but the things that aren't. Anyone who lacks this kind of empathy would simply not write them, and be confused as to why people react to their writing the way so many do.
His self-promotional patter is so simple and consistent you can train half-convincing markov models on it; clearly he could intellectually understand the problem and tone it down a notch or five if he wanted to.
I think the reaction of people to Stephen Wolfram talking about the brilliance of his work in a very mild-mannered way says more about them than it does about him.
I'm pretty sure that this would violate Bell's theorem, and I'd love an explanation of why it wouldn't. It looks to me like a system of local, hidden variables, unless there's some sense in which changes in the hypergraph can propagate faster than the speed of light.
We can prove violation of the CHSH inequality, and hence compatibility with Bell's theorem, as a natural consequence of our formalism. See, for instance:
I'm only halfway through the page, but so far it looks like it's describing a system that's compatible with the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and MWI is local without violating Bell's theorem.
The theory needs a lot of development, so it would be hard to say whether it could or could not comply with Bells theorem. But since it is Turing complete presumably there is some variant of the theory which complies with Bell's theorem.
I find it interesting that under this theory regions of space and properties of objects are emergent phenomena. I suspect that under some variants of the theory, properties of objects could act as if they are both random and non local.
Given his passion for cellular automata and the timing of his post, it would have been nice if Wolfram had at least mentioned the late great Conway and his recent passing.
At times, Eric has quite the way with words; yet on Lex Fridman's podcast, he really struggled to communicate Geometric Unity in a way that's even slightly accessible to a layperson, despite Lex's patient prodding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIAZJNe7YtE
I actually find his brother Bret to be the opposite in his manner, far more measured and comprehensible: though he'll occasionally forget that you might not know a particular term of art (telomeres, extended phenotype), his ideas are more narrowly scoped to genetic selection pressures and game theory, and a little easier to parse. (His experience is primarily as an educator, which Eric's is not.) Bret and his wife have been doing an educational series on COVID-19, which is quite accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-W9O7qhstY&list=PLjQ2gC-5yH...
I love listening to Heather and Bret when they talk about biology.
What irks me most is when Bret starts talking about how our society isn't sustainable and that we need to rethink society by incorporating insights from game theory and evolutionary biology. On that score, he is frustratingly vague. I don't even think I would likely agree with him, but without something more concrete there's nothing there for me to analyze. Perhaps I just haven't found the right podcast or whatever where he goes into exactly what he means by that.
Totally understood. I don't think Bret claims to have a good answer to the problem. I think his thesis is that we're in such uncharted territory, facing multiple existential crises, that none of the thought technologies that helped us up to this point (religion, democracy, capitalism, even scientific materialism) are necessarily going to suffice for us to survive/thrive into the 21st century.
The common-ancestor driving force of those social technologies are genetic selection pressures, which he argues we should consciously and intentionally counter-act. One might fairly claim that that's a quixotic pipe-dream, given that our nature has been shaped by that force for a billion years; but the highly plausible opposing argument is that the alternative is extinction (if not of the species, then perhaps of civilization).
For more proactive ideas on constructing a social operating system for the 21st century and beyond, take a look at the "Game B" model from Jim Rutt, Jordan Hall, and many others:
Could somebody explain to Stephen Wolfram physics is already underway and the normal way to join in is to publish your ideas in appropriate venues and submit them to peer review?
It's been waiting for a genius, a visionary, a maverick, ...
Wolfram's narcissism is so extreme it's just comical. When I was really into complexity science and stuff everyone in the field would joke about it, suggesting a drinking game where you take a shot every time Wolfram refers to how he was a gifted child or started studying math in his teens or single-handedly accomplished some amazing feat. The guy toots his own horn like a circus clown.
It's too bad because he actually does have some very interesting ideas and a good skill at explaining things. His narcissism is self-defeating. He needs to just chill out, write like a normal human being, and publish. Maybe he should take up amateur astronomy. Nothing gives perspective more than carefully observing photons older than the human species with your own eyes.
I sometimes recommend A New Kind of Science with a huge caveat. It's a decent compendium of fascinating cellular automata, complexity, and theoretical CS research with some interesting speculation attached, but (1) Wolfram did not invent all this or do all this work himself, and (2) he takes his speculation too far to the point of flirting with crackpottery. If you can read NKS with those caveats in mind, it's worth at least skimming and taking in the interesting bits.
In university a professor was explaining how Wolfram formulated Physics in the 80s through finite automata instead of Mathematics, that must be the NKS. Is it actually (at least theoretically ;)) possible to calculate something with it, so that results match for instance Newtonian Physics?
It's "just" a different way of formulating mathematics, but sometimes formulating things differently can yield insights. At least attempting physics from this angle is a project with merit, especially since it seems as if conventional mathematical theoretical physics is a little stuck lately.
The problem with the CA-based physics approaches are that while you can create CA models that work and are predictive in ways that mimic conventional mathematical models, so far the approach has failed to produce a compelling model with testable predictions that is unique to the approach.
In other words there's no evidence (yet?) that this approach is better than conventional math, and a strong contrary argument in favor of math can be made from the angle that math maps more clearly to the conceptual space. It's possible to read an equation in terms of the concepts it models, assign units to variables that refer to specific forces or properties, etc. I'm not aware of a way to do that with CA. What you get there are weird rules that manifest something that seems to fit existing mathematical models or concrete observations, but those weird rules are "opaque." It's a relative to the opaqueness problem in AI / machine learning.
Lastly though I would add that the fact that you can create compelling CA models of physics at all does perhaps suggest something about reality. Maybe it suggests that reality is or is similar to a CA system under the hood. The fact that quantum comes from "quanta" and "quantized" suggests that things are in fact discrete at some level.
Admittedly, I only skimmed NKS. That said, I don't understand how the approach is different than anything else abusing the incidental fact that something is Turing complete to re-prove existing results.
The problem with these approaches, like trying to write a neural network in MS Excel, is that it's going to be cumbersome, slow, and provide little advantage over more straightforward calculation methods.
There is an argument, and I think Wolfram has made it, that one would expect the systems and the math to become simpler the deeper and more fundamental the models became, and the opposite seems to be true with modern physics.
When you say conventional math, you’re referring to math that would be quite difficult let’s say for even a dedicated undergraduate math, physics or electrical engineering major. The CA, on the other hand described a process an interested child can comprehend.
But it's only easier to comprehend because it's vaguer. If you wanted to express specific, nontrivial mathematical statements in CA language, it would immediately get more complicated. Certainly, a paragraph about Euclid's Elements would be easier to comprehend than a paragraph from the Elements, but that's not a fair comparison...
But my point is if the CA and the mathematical expression show the same things, then you could say the mathematics are simply a roundabout and confusing way to characterize the CA.
As a thought experiment (and a timely tribute) how would you (mathematically) characterize and/or describe an ongoing evolution of an instances of Conway's Game of Life if you didn't have a grid. Or even better, if you didn't have the grid and you could only see things a resolution of neighborhoods of 10-20 cell resolutions? You might be able to come up with some crazy complex math which does it. But if you knew about the grid and the underlying rules it would explain all of the observations perfectly AND more simply.
Don't get me wrong -- I don't think Wolfram has done that, nor do I really hold out hope that it could be true. But it's a real compelling, if only it were.
> one would expect the systems and the math to become simpler the deeper and more fundamental the models became
The notion that there exists a single expression, CA rule, or other fundamental truth at the root of the physical universe is an arbitrary assumption. It may or may not be true. We should go where the evidence leads us.
In the end we should have a model that is no more and no less complex than what is needed to model observed reality.
Well, his reasoning is sound enough - if his results are truly spectacular, it probably won’t matter that they weren’t published in peer reviewed venues.
At the same time, turning boring results into something fit for publishing can be very time consuming - more than the research itself, and at the opportunity cost of attacking juicier problems.
So if your goal is to utterly revolutionize a field, and you are very confident in your abilities to do so, it’s not the worst strategy in the world to just chase the ideas you’re most excited about and forgo the traditional bureaucratic paths.
I haven't been deeply plugged into Wolfram's breakthroughs since "A New Kind Of Science," but if memory serves I don't think he's discovered anything that offers insight in the physics world in the utility sense. By which I mean: progress in physics usually looks like finding a novel relationship between previously-thought-separate phenomena, an improvement on the mechanics of using an existing theory for predictive power, or a conceptual simplification of existing theory (i.e. a new theory that completely explains the known observable phenomena of the previous theory while shaking out Russell's teapots the previous theory held).
I don't think Wolfram's work in the physics space on the cellular automata model has met any of these criteria, so it's not surprising he's not getting mainstrean publication traction. His CA model isn't bringing us novel relationships (yet; I hold out hope here), it isn't making it easier to do what we already do, it hasn't yielded any predictions that existing theories don't also yield, and it's certainly not simpler than field theory and relationship formulae that don't assume a CA. Until there's a breakthrough in one of those three categories that can't be done easily with one of the traditional mechanisms, Wolfram's doing the scientific equivalent of translating lingua franca physics into Klingon; not really wasted effort in that it can be valuable to see something from more than one point of view, but not something that anyone's gonna pay him for or devote their precious column-inches to.
I’ll let the next few hundred years judge how relevant or not his contribution to physics was. I don’t think anyone writing in 2020 has much sense of that.
Sure, let's force one of the most creative dude of this century back into the rigid pen others are allowed to play in, just in case he does something crazy and interesting.
The guy pretty much single handedly built a profitable company that enables him to pursue whatever research interests he want, and that’s been going for over 30 years.
So did a lot of other people who aren’t extreme narcissists.
I think it’s reasonable to find someone’s work admirable and yet think they have terrible personalities.
There is a line of thought were people should be judged by what they create rather than how they behave, but luckily not many subscribe to it. Not even grown-up Linus Torvalds subscribes to it.
Why is this "lucky"? Its irrational in many cases, frankly. The work survives past the person. The personality quirks of the person are parochial - they only matter insofar as they impact our ability to create knowledge. In the case of a theoretical singular genius (hypothetically, not saying Wolfram is one) then personality traits are completely irrelevant to their impact, since they're not dependent upon collaboration with others. The error would be for those others to disregard their work due to their personality. The benefit would only flow in one direction in that case, and hence, it'd be irrational for the consumers to reject the work.
Has there been any issues of Wolfram assaulting/harassing/abusing/etc other people? Or are people just upset about the pompous style of his writing? Those are different kinds of “behavior”.
Because while we should totally condemn the former, it seems that we’re discussing the latter here, and it’s hard to get riled up about.
As for "one of the most creative dudes of this century", I am puzzled as to how you reach this conclusion.
He certainly seems to be a very bright and capable person, and deserves recognition as the publisher of Mathematica, but that was released last century; what has he created since then that places him so high in your estimation?
N'ah. It's good that folks like Wolfram and Eric Weinstein are taking a different path. Sometimes that's what it takes for new breakthroughs to emerge. If nothing else it could spark new ideas or invigorate others to take bolder approaches and move outside their comfort zone.
What path is Eric Weinstein taking? I've heard about him for the first time yesterday, when a section of his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was linked, where he talked much too confidently about a subject he probably shouldn't.
There are still so many things wrong in how he tells the story that it doesn't pass a basic smell test for me.
- He omits that this study was from 2000, so quite some time ago. Given that the paper about that has 200+ citations, I would say that it got the eyeballs it deserved. He doesn't offer any recent evidence that indicate that this is still the case today.
- The core claim he makes "all mice are broken" is a hyperbole that a lot of people will tell you is unsubstantiated. He makes it sound like all tests done on mice are flawed because of it.
- "I called them up and they were not able to produce any records that they changed their breeding protocols" doesn't mean that they didn't change them in the 20 years that passed. It just means that they didn't produce them to some random person contacting them.
I'm not as "surprised nobody is breaking this story" as he is.
>The core claim he makes "all mice are broken" is a hyperbole that a lot of people will tell you is unsubstantiated. He makes it sound like all tests done on mice are flawed because of it.
It isn't hyperbole, if Bret's claims are substantiated. The claims being that most lab mice are from the Jackson lab, that all of their mice have extremely long telomeres compared to wild mice, and that this could have serious implications on the potential harm to humans by some drugs - even while also accounting for the fact that mice are already not a good model of humans and that the same drugs are later tested on humans. (I could elaborate on this, but it's covered thoroughly in the paper and podcast.)
I agree Eric hasn't satisfactorily proved they didn't change the protocols, but if it is the case that all of their mice still have long telomeres, and if all of the other claims are true (most US researchers still using those mice + the other claims), then the claims "most mice used by US researchers are broken" and "most tests done on mice by US researchers are flawed because of it" are likely also true.
I have no idea if the above claims are true, of course, but they should be investigated on their merits.
Weinstein rented a room in an Oxbridge college to lecture on his theory of everything.
His recent campaign was for his brother who he feels was badly mistreated by a Nobel laureate who he alleges failed to credit him for important related work.
You can hear the latter case on a recent edition of his podcast, The Portal.
I've read a book with this title once, full of formulas. I do not remember who the author was, and the book (or the math in it) did not make sense to me.
What breakthrough for Eric Weinstein? So far he's just been doing this grandiose marketing push where talks in dense comically impenetrable jargon TO LAYMEN (eg the Joe Rogan show) and releases bizarre rambling videos on youtube that attempt to tie together politics, history, his beef with academia and his "theory of everything".
It smells like bullshit but people seem to gobble it up and call him a genius, for what? He hasn't published, there's no complete explanation it's just endless front-matter for never-completely explained "geometric unity." If you've ever heard of the internet scammer Ty Lopez... that's what this guy sounds like but for physics instead of self-help.
Eric says his theory is a work in progress, may be wrong and may even be fool's gold (his words). That's a ways off from claiming breakthrough. And I don't see him selling magic pills or some get rich quick scheme.
It seems to me he's just exploring ideas in the open. That's great. I don't see the problem.
But he's not really exploring the ideas "in the open".
He is making REALLY HUGE claims in advance of releasing the actual products of his supposed 3 decades of work. He is making these claims in popular media and creating a buzz-- first. I suppose that's his prerogative, but it doesn't seem like science to me. The scientists I admire most take ENORMOUS effort to communicate clearly, adjust to their audience, focus on making compelling arguments, and above all "show their work". This guy does the exact opposite.
One other thing he keeps on citing is this bizarre quote from Dirac:
> "... it is more important to have beauty in one's equations that to have them fit experiment...".
That's perfectly fine, for a while, but it doesn't BECOME PHYSICS until it agrees with experiment at a minimum.
341 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 92.3 ms ] threadAmong the many many many red flags, Wolfram claims to have discovered that complexity can emerge from simple rules in the early 80's. This is a full decade after P. W. Anderson's seminal paper [More is Different](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393).
In fact, if you haven't RTFA yet, save your time and just read the original, rigorous, less self-aggrandizing paper: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393
Total red flag. His obsession with this - though - does not seem ill placed. As far as smell tests go, I think this thread is worth pulling.
Do I need a journal membership?
http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72mo...
Though I must admit I don’t really understand it. I was expecting automata to be referenced somewhere.
I enjoyed A New Kind of Science, though I feel like it would have been a much shorter book if Wolfram included less self-aggrandizing.
It's more fundamental than automata papers, so of course it doesn't address automata, but automata papers should reference it.
"A New Kind of Science proposed ideas that were not new, were not kind, and were not science. Discuss."
> Q: How do you know if Stephen Wolfram invented something?
> A: He'll tell you.
I saw a TED talk by Conrad Wolfram about using Mathematica as an educational tool [1]. I went to one of my tutorials and tried to discuss it with the Professor (we were encouraged to bring up basically anything we'd seen or encountered in our first few weeks of uni). His response was "I don't think we need to worry about what Conrad Wolfram is saying."
By all accounts, Stephen and Conrad Wolfram are clever men. It is without a doubt that Mathematica is an extraordinary piece of software. Many people here will have benefitted from Wolfram Alpha and will have used Mathematica either in an academic context or in an engineering context.
Stephen Wolfram, however, is not Christ, even though he likes to think so.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60OVlfAUPJg
Curious to hear what people who actually study this stuff think about this supposedly discovery.
Is he a crank? For a classic definition of crank, no. Does this work represent a clearer understanding of physics than we had prior, or is it an interesting diversion? Harder question, but one has to assume, probably diversion.
On the other hand if time travel or teleportation IS ever invented, my money is that it will be Wolfram.
"A New Kind of Science: A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity" (2002)
>As the saying goes, there is much here that is new and true, but what is true is not new, and what is new is not true; and some of it is even old and false, or at least utterly unsupported.
His company was running accelerated calculus experiments at universities built around Mathematica. There’s a reason your teacher doesn’t want you using a graphing calculator for your algebra homework. I know that now.
Ever since I’ve been carrying around a block of salt for Mr Wolfram and get a lot of schadenfreude out of him showing what a mad scientist he is.
Does anyone remember that self obsessed book he wrote about fifteen years back? Hell I can’t even remember the title. Sure changed the world, didn’t it.
He's genuinely smart and genuinely looking into an underexplored branch of theory with tons of upside potential, but he also does... this sort of thing, all the time.
http://www.wolframphysics.org/visual-summary/
Based on this image alone, having not yet read the article, it looks like he’s taken his prior insights on cellular automata (Conway’s Game type stuff) and advanced them forward to quarks and Feynman diagrams.
I typically have a very rough time with Wolfram’s writing but the image is, at least, simple enough to follow. “What are the rules for particle timeflows?” is certainly a question that’s interesting though my phrasing is probably terrible.
EDIT: Yup, it’s definitely quarks X cellular automata. Clearly an extension of previous Wolfram work, still just as enthusiastic / savior-ish as ever. I hope it pans out somehow in pragmatic real world outcomes someday. Bonus link to diagram showing a fate decision tree behaving like a Conway glider:
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2020/04/040...
leads to
one thing making another thing pushing back on one thing making another thing.
Group them together. Allow groups to connect back to themselves.
Run them in very high numbers. Try to find shortcuts. Relate shortcuts to real world.
Note that I have no idea if Wolfram is right or not, but I’m glad I tried and failed to read New Kind of Science years ago. The mindset/approach were worth it and make it possible to follow along with today’s post.
Coincidental timing of publication - one day after John Conway's passing. We may be in a n-dimensional Game of Life after all.
Just a few years laters, people quickly translated this to graphs - a network. The spacial interpretation aside, the idea surely should hold for higher dimensional social relations.
And that's where we reach and interesting point that Wolfram writes about: These system are useful, as long as we can calculate or derive a state. If all we can do is simulate it, then it's much less useful. And indeed, creating such models is the true "art".
So while the "idea" of using relations and hypergraphs lays a foundation that I am sympathetic to, I also feel like the things "on the to do list" are, indeed, the meat of the issue.
1) Conway has obviously been in the news recently (RIP) and there have been quite a few articles talking about his "Game of Life". The fact that complex patterns emerge from three basic rules seems eerily similar to what Wolfram is now describing. Of course, computational power is now to the point where you can run many more games that we could the first time I entered the program into my Z80-based machine.
2) There's also been a lot of discussion the last couple years about whether we're living in a simulation. With Wolfram performing "zillions" of operations, could it be that there's actually someone living inside his computer wondering the same thing? As we progress in our computing ability, could this happen in the future? If we ourselves are living in a simulation, could those simulating us also be living in a simulation? Is it also turtles all the way up?
2) Yep, it will happen in future, but infinity is not possible in simulation.
At the time of writing this comment, the majority of responses here are just calling the guy a pompous crank, rather than pointing out specific issues with the central claims of the proposal. Funny that this is on the website created by the guy who proposed the Hierarchy of Disagreement [0]. There are many comments with valid critiques, but so far there are more of the other kind.
Yeah, Wolfram and Weinstein have some eccentricities, and the intro section to this is kind of unnecessary and grating and could probably be cut out, but they're also very intelligent people who have discovered and created things which are both "new and true" (and/or new and useful) rather than merely "true or new, mutually exclusively" as people like to snidely parrot.
I'm not saying this theory or Weinstein's theory aren't necessarily irreparably riddled with holes. Just that the nature of the criticism often seems bizarre, poor quality, and directed at their personalities rather than their content, like in this comment section. It'd be much more refreshing to see it be criticized on its merits rather than its tone or the personality traits of its author.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_D...
But a graph has nodes and edges. Nodes, in this case, can be particles.. I guess? But what are the edges? When a "simple rule" is applied to a collection of particles, what is the force that connects them after the interaction? I read some of the material in detail and skimmed some of the rest, but there was a lot of setup and cool graph visualizations and not a lot speaking to this core question.
Disclaimer: I'm not a theoretical physicist but I have read "Quantum Physics for Babies" at least 50 times.
Save your time, just read More is Different: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
The article suggests that working out the theory of something like rule production systems, and then figuring out how that theory relates to existing insights from physics, is the best path toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics.
My primary source of skepticism stems from the fact that the theory of rule production systems is not exactly a new area of study. It's been well-developed at various points in time and from various perspectives by the theoretical CS, programming language theory, automated theorem proving, and mathematical logic communities. That theory addresses most of Stephen's "big difficult questions" about the non-physics side of things. For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a very old and extremely well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory.
I sympathize with Stephen. In fact, he sounds a bit like I did early in my scientific career. Unfortunately, though, I just don't see how these old well-understood ideas from computer science are going to result in a new fundamental theory of physics.
Besides, Stephen's approach here is to ignore 15-20 years of research from various CS sub-communities; his best case scenario is spending a decade reinventing that wheel. The problem with cross-talk that isn't "humble on both sides" is that it's either a) a waste of time because one side's ideas aren't that important, or else b) a waste of time because one side has to reinvent the other wise.
In terms of "humility on both sides", it's such a common theme that this oft-cited assumption is taken as truth. Some of the greatest minds who had the most impact in our history were also insufferable assholes, who were stubborn and would not yield until people were forced to reckon with their ideas. Is this me defending Wolfram's ideas? No. But it's me defending the idea that "humility and civility" as a prerequisite for scientific advancement seems false, and in fact, in stagnant fields, the need for a disruptive personality who happens to be right may be perhaps the only real way out of the rut.
The problem, in the very particular case of this blog post, is that the cost for lacking intellectual humility is spending time reinventing other people's wheels. And those wheels won't get him as far as he thinks they will. We know because they've already been built by others.
I think we should separate:
- Wolfram acting as though he thought of the ideas first
- Wolfram being underinformed so as to undermine his own progress
People typically get bent out of shape on the former, which is in evidence, and is a problem of politics. The latter, we can't prove or disprove unless you see him drawing significant conclusions that are falsifiable via current understanding. If that is the case, then I'll yield. But I suspect Wolfram may be more well read than he lets on, but for whatever reason, has a dysfunctional personality trait where he sees his own wrangling with ideas already put forth as a form of authorship, when he incorporates it into his long chain of analysis that he's been doing for decades. A potential analogy is one of "re-branding" - but in this case it's re-branding as part of an internal narrative, one where in the final chapter, Wolfram sees himself as the grand author of the unified theory. In that mental model, each idea he draws from is not one he cobbles together into a unified form, but instead, ideas he incorporates and reinterprets in his own bespoke system and methods, leading him to forget that the core ideas are not his own. (I'm definitely reaching here, but trying to to highlight how the two things above could be in fact very materially divergent and consistent with the evidence.)
> Wolfram [is] acting as though he thought of the ideas first.
This is called plagiarism. Independent reinvention is no defense if you keep on acting as though you had the idea first. He has already been informed many times that parts of his work are not original, and his behavior doesn't change.
And he knows it, on some level. He made the decision to communicate his "discoveries" in press releases and self-published books. He knows he's not subjecting himself to peer review. He may know, on some level, that his work couldn't pass it. He sued one of his employees to prevent him (the employee) from publishing a proof that Wolfram claimed he had discovered in his book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110
I understand what you're up to in trying to invent a psychology that explains his bad behavior, but at some point you have to withdraw empathy and think pragmatically about consequences. Wolfram's actions are already more than sufficient to disgrace an ordinary academic. He's damaged at least one career that we know of. He tries to pass himself off as a visionary scientist only he never delivers. If he wasn't independently wealthy no one would be listening to him at all. But non-experts do listen, which is precisely why speaking up against pseudoscience is part of every real scientist's professional responsibilities. Rather than spin these theories, it would be a better use of your time to send Stephen some email urging him to stick to working on Mathematica.
The wikipedia article claims that Wolfram conjectured rule 110 in 1985 many years before Cook. Out of curiosity, do you have any info that disputes this?
That doesn't matter much, though. Academics have a lot of ways to deal with priority disputes. Sometimes they author a paper together. Sometimes they each publish separately in the same issue of one journal. That's what happened when Darwin and Wallis simultaneously developed the theory of evolution. Sometimes, if the first discoverer was much earlier than the second, the second author might publish the work, and make a public statement in the paper saying the first author was first. This is what happened when Claude Shannon invented information theory only to learn that Norbert Wiener had done the same thing twenty years before. If Wolfram had documentation of his claim, some compromise could probably have been worked out.
Instead, it's a matter of public record that he sued Cook, alleging that the knowledge that Cook had done the work was a trade secret of Wolfram Research. I said before that scientists get paid by correctly being assigned credit for their discoveries. Suing to prevent a scientist from taking credit for their research is like armed robbery. There had been some grumbling before, but this was the moment when scientists recognized that Stephen Wolfram was Not A Real Scientist Anymore.
What specific literature are you referring to?
> Everything in physics and physical reality must have a digital informational representation.
Can you go into a little more detail about the other versions of these ideas? What are they called in other theories?
In order to be useful, this model should either create a new testable prediction or speed up computations in existing models while retaining accuracy. It seems to be in the latter camp. I would like to understand more about why this model is more computationally efficient.
Perhaps there’s more work to be done on the process of generating rules or limiting the types of rules. Arbitrarily choosing rules to create properties that look similar to observed physical properties doesn’t seem to point to a fundamental theory.
What are the old names for these ideas?
What are the names for these old, well-studied things in programming language theory, so we can look them up?
I've decided that I do not have the time or interest in writing the Related Work section for a paper-length blog post touching on an enormous number of fields, some of which I know well and some of which I haven't thought about in a decade. (As an aside, one real and substantive problem with trying to build a research program without taking the time to share a survey and comparison with related work is that you'll have difficulty communicating with others. It will then take extra effort on others' part to build up a knowledge base. Surveying and comparing to related work is hard and thankless but important work. It's not about credit, it's about building up a shared knowledge base.)
However, I can spare an hour or two and take the time to flesh out one or two in order to demonstrate what I mean.
So, I'll make the following offer: is there any particular excerpt from Stephen's blog post to which you would like the CS/PL/info theory analogue? Or, would you prefer me to pick a particular sentence and identify the body of work that explores that question and the major results of that body of work? (I will take this opportunity to emphasize the "about the non-physics side of things" portion of my original post.)
I'm going to link to this thread in other places where people have asked this question instead of monitoring 3 or 4 different threads going forward. I'll do my best to occasionally monitor this thread for requests and do my best to reply. FYI, I probably won't get around to answering more than one reply until the weekend.
If these concepts don't have a single name that you can just rattle off, and that we can Google - if describing them in terms of existing theory would take serious effort - then surely identifying and naming them is a major contribution?
I don't understand how things could be extremely well studied and developed, but also not exist in some fashion where you could just name and link to it in a matter of minutes rather than hours. Example "emulation cones are called X here".
I've listened to Wolfram and skimmed one of his books before deciding he's beyond my ability to evaluate as genius or crackpot. I'd love to be able to nail down a specific thing where I could read about some existing topic and then read about Wolfram claiming to reinvent it or something, because that could help me learn towards one conclusion over the other in the genius versus crackpot consideration.
One frustrating thing that I often find is that much of Wolfram criticism is non-specific and as it's impossible for me to bucket Wolfram I can't bucket his critics either because they tend not to provide enough detail or clarity.
Emulation cones go by various names, but perhaps the most common is the (bounded) reflexive and transitive closure of a reduction rules of a system. Another common name is the (bounded) reachable set.
Rulial spaces, by which I mean the particular ones Stephen seems interested in toward the end, are higher order term rewriting systems or higher order syntax. But actually, rulial space is used throughout the text in a much more general sense. I'd consider even very canonical results from PL theory, e.g. confluence of rewriting, to be non-trivial observations about a particular rulial space.
The reason for giving (or at least very vaguely hinting at) a definition for rulial spaces and emulation cones is to talk about foliations and then expressiveness. There's some connection between foliation and bisimulation that's difficult to exactly nail down, because nailing it down requires a lot more precision about the exact sort of (emulation cones we are interested in and for which) spaces. The connection between expressiveness and complexity hierarchies is immediately obvious, I think, right?
> One frustrating thing that I often find is that much of Wolfram criticism is non-specific and as it's impossible for me to bucket Wolfram I can't bucket his critics either because they tend not to provide enough detail or clarity.
Oy, no good deed goes unpunished :)
Look, I get why it's frustrating.
But, really, there's a reason that rule #0 of technical writing is to define terms before using them. The reader can only do so much.
>For example, his "emulation cones" are a new name for a very old and extremely well-studied idea. The term "rulial space", similarly, is a new name for an idea that's well-developed in programming language theory.'
What's the old well-studied idea, and the well-developed programming theory idea? A one sentence reply is fine.
Maybe you could advise some developed language or model for this task? The interesting part is to have code-data duality and enough rich language to kick start natural selection that would produce competing algorithms that would gradually become more and more complex (and gradually become closer to sentience).
Though the language might not even be Truring complete as it is. As natural assumption would be that the model should be finite in resources and it can get access to infinite time or memory only in time limit (assuming that the individual algorithms would survive for this to happen).
"However, were the book more cautious in its claims and more willing to acknowledge previous work, it would likely be easier for readers to assess what it does offer: a cellular-automaton-based perspective on existing ideas in science"
Wolfram's press release focused method of advancing his "scientific advances" is so off putting, and highly suspicious that it is more hype that really something new.
I wonder if this hapless postdoc-equivalent is going to get sued, too!
https://www.nature.com/articles/417216a
https://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2002-July/005692.html
His stuff just amounts to large claims and a lot of fiddling around. Its certainly possible that something could come out of it (I mean the idea "physics is just some rules" is vacuously true) but I don't see in any of the work surrounding his ideas any true attempt to get to the bottom of things by trying very hard to understand basic ideas like locality and unitarity and how they must be true or may be violated by physical models which are deeper than the ones we have.
If you want to see that kind of actual hard scientific work, see Nima Arkani Hamad or Gerard 't Hooft.
I, personally, was a bad researcher, which is why I couldn't cut it as an academic. What made me bad was that I got lost in fiddling around rather than trying to hit the most incisive questions in the most useful ways. I see a lot of that in Wolfram.
't Hooft, Gerard: The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41285-6
Reference number 23.
So, hats off. Even if this isn't the Big Idea, maybe it'll end up sparking an idea in someone else's head down the road that gets us there.
I'm genuinely not sure why you believe this especially as we live in an era when theoretical physics and experimental physics are becoming so entwined and the product is a fairly successful testing of our models of physics.
I can only gather this from 2nd hand accounts in pop-sci articles and mainstream physics books, but the lack of falsifiability and experimentalism for these things, combined with a large surface area of failed attempts, seems to have left physics in a rut.
There doesn't seem to have been any widely accepted fundamental theoretical breakthrough like general relativity or quantum mechanics for a long time, nor has there been any widely accepted way to unify the two theories. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the impression I and many others have.
Co Sider biology. What is the last major biology idea that made a huge public splsh? DNA? The human genome sequence? But are biologists stuck the world round? Of course not there have been hundreds if not thousands of notable biology findings in the past 20 years.
Theoretical physics probably simply appears stuck to us because as lay people we focus on a couple of large scale questions that for now are probably out of reach. But we don't consider the hundreds of theoretical physics refinements and observations that need to go into the development of the LHC or LIGO or James Webb etc.
Anyway, that's just like my opinion man.
Basically, people have been building giant ladders and constantly improving them, but we don't know if any of the ladders were put up against the right wall. We have no idea if these theories actually correspond to reality or not. For example, string theory and supersymmetry.
The LHC was created partly with the goal and expectation of detecting particles that would validate supersymmetry, but so far it hasn't, and many are beginning to believe the theory may be flawed or wrong. In some sense that is a bit of a theoretical advancement, but so far, supersymmetry theorists don't appear to have a popular alternative they're considering instead. If they fail to find evidence for it in the next 10 or so years, it's probably just a total dead end. And string theory has been at it for even longer.
Human genome editing using CRISPR-Cas9 a few years ago was pretty big tbh.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4417674
I think his work will lay down the foundations of science for centuries to come.
It is curious though. Nearly every criticism I’ve read hasn’t grappled with his ideas—just the man, out of insecurity and ego.
And he’s a lovely writer. I don’t sense ego from him. Just honesty about the work he’s done and contributed. You read him and get the sense his prose is calm—like light particles flowing down a river.
His stories about the remarkable scientists he’s met is some of the best writing I’ve ever read.
He doesn't, and IMO that makes him responsible.
In any case, rational people ought to just get over it.
> he simply cannot recognize these political concerns.
I'm saying that he clearly can, but he chooses not to.
If by "getting over it" you mean passing judgement and moving on to the theory itself, which is new and worth some thought & discussion, agreed 100%.
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...
Or, for a less technical version of the basic idea:
https://www.wolframphysics.org/questions/quantum-mechanics/h...
I find it interesting that under this theory regions of space and properties of objects are emergent phenomena. I suspect that under some variants of the theory, properties of objects could act as if they are both random and non local.
> And for example my book A New Kind of Science is about this whole phenomenon and why it’s so important for science and beyond.
Right...
Can anyone think of someone???
I actually find his brother Bret to be the opposite in his manner, far more measured and comprehensible: though he'll occasionally forget that you might not know a particular term of art (telomeres, extended phenotype), his ideas are more narrowly scoped to genetic selection pressures and game theory, and a little easier to parse. (His experience is primarily as an educator, which Eric's is not.) Bret and his wife have been doing an educational series on COVID-19, which is quite accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-W9O7qhstY&list=PLjQ2gC-5yH...
What irks me most is when Bret starts talking about how our society isn't sustainable and that we need to rethink society by incorporating insights from game theory and evolutionary biology. On that score, he is frustratingly vague. I don't even think I would likely agree with him, but without something more concrete there's nothing there for me to analyze. Perhaps I just haven't found the right podcast or whatever where he goes into exactly what he means by that.
The common-ancestor driving force of those social technologies are genetic selection pressures, which he argues we should consciously and intentionally counter-act. One might fairly claim that that's a quixotic pipe-dream, given that our nature has been shaped by that force for a billion years; but the highly plausible opposing argument is that the alternative is extinction (if not of the species, then perhaps of civilization).
For more proactive ideas on constructing a social operating system for the 21st century and beyond, take a look at the "Game B" model from Jim Rutt, Jordan Hall, and many others:
https://medium.com/@memetic007/a-journey-to-gameb-4fb13772bc...
https://medium.com/@jordangreenhall
Wolfram's narcissism is so extreme it's just comical. When I was really into complexity science and stuff everyone in the field would joke about it, suggesting a drinking game where you take a shot every time Wolfram refers to how he was a gifted child or started studying math in his teens or single-handedly accomplished some amazing feat. The guy toots his own horn like a circus clown.
It's too bad because he actually does have some very interesting ideas and a good skill at explaining things. His narcissism is self-defeating. He needs to just chill out, write like a normal human being, and publish. Maybe he should take up amateur astronomy. Nothing gives perspective more than carefully observing photons older than the human species with your own eyes.
I sometimes recommend A New Kind of Science with a huge caveat. It's a decent compendium of fascinating cellular automata, complexity, and theoretical CS research with some interesting speculation attached, but (1) Wolfram did not invent all this or do all this work himself, and (2) he takes his speculation too far to the point of flirting with crackpottery. If you can read NKS with those caveats in mind, it's worth at least skimming and taking in the interesting bits.
The problem with the CA-based physics approaches are that while you can create CA models that work and are predictive in ways that mimic conventional mathematical models, so far the approach has failed to produce a compelling model with testable predictions that is unique to the approach.
In other words there's no evidence (yet?) that this approach is better than conventional math, and a strong contrary argument in favor of math can be made from the angle that math maps more clearly to the conceptual space. It's possible to read an equation in terms of the concepts it models, assign units to variables that refer to specific forces or properties, etc. I'm not aware of a way to do that with CA. What you get there are weird rules that manifest something that seems to fit existing mathematical models or concrete observations, but those weird rules are "opaque." It's a relative to the opaqueness problem in AI / machine learning.
Lastly though I would add that the fact that you can create compelling CA models of physics at all does perhaps suggest something about reality. Maybe it suggests that reality is or is similar to a CA system under the hood. The fact that quantum comes from "quanta" and "quantized" suggests that things are in fact discrete at some level.
The problem with these approaches, like trying to write a neural network in MS Excel, is that it's going to be cumbersome, slow, and provide little advantage over more straightforward calculation methods.
When you say conventional math, you’re referring to math that would be quite difficult let’s say for even a dedicated undergraduate math, physics or electrical engineering major. The CA, on the other hand described a process an interested child can comprehend.
As a thought experiment (and a timely tribute) how would you (mathematically) characterize and/or describe an ongoing evolution of an instances of Conway's Game of Life if you didn't have a grid. Or even better, if you didn't have the grid and you could only see things a resolution of neighborhoods of 10-20 cell resolutions? You might be able to come up with some crazy complex math which does it. But if you knew about the grid and the underlying rules it would explain all of the observations perfectly AND more simply.
Don't get me wrong -- I don't think Wolfram has done that, nor do I really hold out hope that it could be true. But it's a real compelling, if only it were.
The notion that there exists a single expression, CA rule, or other fundamental truth at the root of the physical universe is an arbitrary assumption. It may or may not be true. We should go where the evidence leads us.
In the end we should have a model that is no more and no less complex than what is needed to model observed reality.
Also, can't we observe photons older than human species with our naked eyes without taking up amateur astronomy?
>Note: Since 1987, Stephen Wolfram's intellectual efforts have not primarily been reported in academic articles.
At the same time, turning boring results into something fit for publishing can be very time consuming - more than the research itself, and at the opportunity cost of attacking juicier problems.
So if your goal is to utterly revolutionize a field, and you are very confident in your abilities to do so, it’s not the worst strategy in the world to just chase the ideas you’re most excited about and forgo the traditional bureaucratic paths.
I don't think Wolfram's work in the physics space on the cellular automata model has met any of these criteria, so it's not surprising he's not getting mainstrean publication traction. His CA model isn't bringing us novel relationships (yet; I hold out hope here), it isn't making it easier to do what we already do, it hasn't yielded any predictions that existing theories don't also yield, and it's certainly not simpler than field theory and relationship formulae that don't assume a CA. Until there's a breakthrough in one of those three categories that can't be done easily with one of the traditional mechanisms, Wolfram's doing the scientific equivalent of translating lingua franca physics into Klingon; not really wasted effort in that it can be valuable to see something from more than one point of view, but not something that anyone's gonna pay him for or devote their precious column-inches to.
What a lame idea, truly worthy of a mandarin.
Eg. American Power and The New Mandarins. (Book)
I think it’s an important and relevant term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(bureaucrat)
They hate him cause they ain’t him.
I think it’s reasonable to find someone’s work admirable and yet think they have terrible personalities. There is a line of thought were people should be judged by what they create rather than how they behave, but luckily not many subscribe to it. Not even grown-up Linus Torvalds subscribes to it.
Because while we should totally condemn the former, it seems that we’re discussing the latter here, and it’s hard to get riled up about.
As for "one of the most creative dudes of this century", I am puzzled as to how you reach this conclusion.
He certainly seems to be a very bright and capable person, and deserves recognition as the publisher of Mathematica, but that was released last century; what has he created since then that places him so high in your estimation?
Video links and discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/g0ioxq/if_it_is_...
- He omits that this study was from 2000, so quite some time ago. Given that the paper about that has 200+ citations, I would say that it got the eyeballs it deserved. He doesn't offer any recent evidence that indicate that this is still the case today.
- The core claim he makes "all mice are broken" is a hyperbole that a lot of people will tell you is unsubstantiated. He makes it sound like all tests done on mice are flawed because of it.
- "I called them up and they were not able to produce any records that they changed their breeding protocols" doesn't mean that they didn't change them in the 20 years that passed. It just means that they didn't produce them to some random person contacting them.
I'm not as "surprised nobody is breaking this story" as he is.
It isn't hyperbole, if Bret's claims are substantiated. The claims being that most lab mice are from the Jackson lab, that all of their mice have extremely long telomeres compared to wild mice, and that this could have serious implications on the potential harm to humans by some drugs - even while also accounting for the fact that mice are already not a good model of humans and that the same drugs are later tested on humans. (I could elaborate on this, but it's covered thoroughly in the paper and podcast.)
I agree Eric hasn't satisfactorily proved they didn't change the protocols, but if it is the case that all of their mice still have long telomeres, and if all of the other claims are true (most US researchers still using those mice + the other claims), then the claims "most mice used by US researchers are broken" and "most tests done on mice by US researchers are flawed because of it" are likely also true.
I have no idea if the above claims are true, of course, but they should be investigated on their merits.
Bret Weinstein's 2002 paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11909679
The podcast between Eric and Bret Weinstein covering the full story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s
Not sure if you already listened to the podcast, but if you haven't, I'd recommend listening to all of it.
His recent campaign was for his brother who he feels was badly mistreated by a Nobel laureate who he alleges failed to credit him for important related work.
You can hear the latter case on a recent edition of his podcast, The Portal.
I've read a book with this title once, full of formulas. I do not remember who the author was, and the book (or the math in it) did not make sense to me.
It smells like bullshit but people seem to gobble it up and call him a genius, for what? He hasn't published, there's no complete explanation it's just endless front-matter for never-completely explained "geometric unity." If you've ever heard of the internet scammer Ty Lopez... that's what this guy sounds like but for physics instead of self-help.
At least Wolfram has something to show.
It seems to me he's just exploring ideas in the open. That's great. I don't see the problem.
He is making REALLY HUGE claims in advance of releasing the actual products of his supposed 3 decades of work. He is making these claims in popular media and creating a buzz-- first. I suppose that's his prerogative, but it doesn't seem like science to me. The scientists I admire most take ENORMOUS effort to communicate clearly, adjust to their audience, focus on making compelling arguments, and above all "show their work". This guy does the exact opposite.
One other thing he keeps on citing is this bizarre quote from Dirac: > "... it is more important to have beauty in one's equations that to have them fit experiment...".
That's perfectly fine, for a while, but it doesn't BECOME PHYSICS until it agrees with experiment at a minimum.
Millionaires with connections.
Let's not pretend there is necessarily any more merit to their theories than that of any unconnected obscure crank or even intelligent outsiders.
They aren't getting publicity on the strength of their ideas (even if there is something to them).
But I don't think there's much in the way of existing theoretical math attacking this area.
Much will need to be invented / discovered.