So one of the things I was pleased to do a week or so ago was to try to explain our fundamental theory of physics on a livestream aimed at kids, assuming essentially no prior knowledge. I won’t be surprised if both ideas somehow dovetail together. No doubt people will point out errors and limitations (including “you should also refer to so-and-so”)—and we look forward to using this input to make everything as good as possible. But actually, it seems as if it may be possible to capture the essence of what’s going on in bound states with even very simple toy examples in our models—in which for instance there are just cycles in the multiway graph. How about networks? Also, by bypassing the peer-review system you automatically put yourself outside the scientific community. Composite image made by NASA’s Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes.Image: NASAStephen Wolfram, computer scientist, physicist, and CEO of software company Wolfram Research (behind Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica) made headlines this week when he launched the Wolfram Physics Project. The quantum computing framework can in effect just be viewed as an application of our MultiwaySystem function that we put in the Wolfram Function Repository for the Physics Project. Stephen Wolfram announced this project today: , providing a fascinating foundation for a theory of physics. We launched the Wolfram Physics Project two weeks ago, on April 14. ISI highly cited author? But now—through thinking about physics—I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a way. And I really love the elegance of what’s emerging from our models. They want to get involved. Well, this setup immediately seems a lot more like the situation we have in our models—or in physics—where different updates can happen in any order, subject only to following the causal relationships defined by the causal graph. Is there an analog of the Feynman path integral in distributed computing? We don’t yet know how this could come out in our models (though we have some possible ideas)—but this is something we’re planning to explore soon. But we’ll see. Here’s what we’ve come up with. It’s actually a very analogous idea to something I did rather successfully in the mid-1980s for fluid flow. Wolframs Theory Of The Universe Physics Project Article Review. (Image credit: Wolfram Physics Project) Physicist Stephen Wolfram thinks he's figured out a framework that … But right now what’s most important to me is what a tremendous pleasure it is to share all this with such a broad spectrum of people. First, every reviewer gives information about themselves, and we validate that the person posting is who they say they are. But on its own, it doesn’t seem like it could work. We imagined filling in the plane by making something like a string figure that joins points on the two vectors: But now there’s an easy generalization to the hypergraph. And this in turn is related to what’s called CPT invariance. Maybe different sequences of “environments” correspond to different foliations, sampling different parts of the possible sequence of genetic variations. Why might there be a connection? 35 votes, 85 comments. We’ve given introductions to the project—both lecture style and Q&A. One of the reasons I wanted to think about angular momentum was because of quantum mechanics. When we’re talking about quantum mechanics, many important practical phenomena arise from looking at bound states where for example some particle is restricted to a limited region (like an electron in a hydrogen atom), and we’re interested in various time-repeating eigenstates. So we started wondering whether somehow this could be used in practice to set up simulations. Well, we’re just starting to have a system that lets one interactively manipulate graphs in 3D in VR. In only 2 weeks, thousands have participated in the open Physics Project. Please enter your comment (at least 5 characters). And particularly since my livestream seemed to get good reviews from both kids and others, I’m planning in the next week or two to put together a written version of this as a kind of “very elementary” introduction to our project. One of the most notable features of our models for physics when it comes to distributed computing is the notion of multiway evolution. I’m guessing that phenomena and results in distributed computing are going to have direct analogs in general relativity and in quantum mechanics. And, more than that, even supposedly point particles—like electrons—have nonzero quantized spin angular momentum. We started discussing applications. //. It’s fine when one manages to get a combinator expression that can successfully be evaluated (through some path) to a fixed point. And how do our black holes generate things like Hawking radiation? And, second, thinking about branchial space (and quantum observation frames) gives more concreteness to the notion of quantum measurement. How does one explain discrete space? But not this project. It’s mathematically complicated—because it must describe the combined geometry of physical and branchial space. We’ll also be adding 3D geometry for rendering of graphs and hypergraphs. Nikolaj-K / wolfram_physics_project.txt. But my friend Paul Ginsparg (founder of arXiv) tells me there’s nothing like that in place; it’s just a question of deciding on categories and handling hundreds of megabytes of data. We haven’t tried it yet (and someone should!). In the last two weeks, we’ve done more than 25 hours of livestreams about the project. It’s been possible for a long time to make “aggregated” models of biological evolution, where one’s looking at total numbers of organisms of some particular type (with essentially the direct analog of differential-equation-based aggregated epidemiological models). Some features of black holes we should be able to see by looking at ordinary spacetime causal graphs. The project builds on Wolfram's previous research into computational systems, as explored in his book, A New Kind of Science.The project was launched in April 2020 with the main contributors being Stephen Wolfram, Jonathan Gorard and Max Piskunov. Started by Physicist-Computer Scientist-Entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram, the project envisions the Universe as one big network. The blog post announcing the project … One way to imagine doing an NP problem in polynomial time is not to use an ordinary Turing machine, but instead to use a “non-deterministic Turing machine” in which there is a tree of possible paths where one can pick any path to follow. In our fundamentally discrete model it’s a bit less shocking, and in fact things like black holes (and other kinds of spacetime singularities) seem to arise very naturally in our models. But what if the computing elements are instead operating asynchronously, sending data to each other when it happens to be ready? But in fact, each of C, P and T invariance is violated somewhere in particle physics (and this fact was a favorite of mine back when I did particle physics for a living). It makes it possible for a mere human to follow along and get hold of the basic insights. New conclusions. We can get considerably more formal than this, talking about flux of causal edges in slices of tubes defined by pairs of geodesics. And given that we’re looking at all paths, we’re led to invent things like quantum observation frames, and branchial space. Edges in another direction correspond to space. And now the question of whether different people might have been close enough in space and time for contagion becomes one of reconstructing spatial graphs by making plausible foliations of the causal graph. Back in the mid-1980s, for example, when I was helping a company (Thinking Machines Corporation) that was building a 65536-processor computer (the Connection Machine), I thought the most plausible way to do programming on such a system would be through none other than graph rewriting. But what I did instead was to start with an idealized model of discrete molecules—and then to simulate lots of these molecules. And I’m fully expecting that there’ll be projects at the Summer School that lead, for example, to academic papers that rapidly become classics. Yes, the whole multiway graph is entirely determined by the underlying rule. And that ideas from physics in the context of our models are going to give one new ways to think about distributed computing. And we’ve started to assemble a “Visual Gallery” of these forms. Here’s what we created to give an illustration of this: So now we are beginning to have a picture of angular momentum: it is “activity” that “circulates around” in this little “patch of plane” defined by two geodesics from a particular point. This is super interesting to me. We’ve also already helped several people get started on projects that use their expertise—in physics, mathematics or computer science—and it’s wonderful to see the beginning of this kind of “scaling up”. In a sense this shouldn’t be too surprising. And the biggest focus seems to be around “What about peer review?”. And indeed many modern distributed computing systems are again “just running” without getting to “final results” (think: the internet, or a blockchain). Strictly speaking, the Wolfram Physics project isn’t science and is merely a collection of ideas (with a lot of marketing). I’m hoping I’ll be able to write “progress reports” like this one from time to time, but we’re planning on consistently using the new Twitter feed for the project to give specific, timely updates: Please follow us! In traditional continuum general relativity it always seems a bit shocking when there’s some kind of discontinuity in the structure of spacetime. Science is usually done behind closed doors. Of course, there are people who think “This isn’t the way science usually works; something must be wrong”. The branchial graph defines sibling tasks. Stephen Wolfram leads a new approach to discover the fundamental theory of physics. Some of this comes from the working sessions we’ve had; some is in response to questions at our Q&As and some is just the result of my slowly growing understanding—particularly helped by my efforts in explaining the project to people. Two geodesics—and the geodesics “strung” between them—define a plane. "The Wolfram Physics Project" calls on scientists of all disciplines to contribute. And over the last couple of weeks we’ve been progressively expanding the Q&A section of the project website to try to address the most common of the questions: In addition to being (we hope) very interesting from a scientific point of view, our models also produce interesting visual forms. The most straightforward are inertial frames. My knowledge of history, and my own past experiences, tell me that there’s a lot of truth to this. 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