{"id":12842,"date":"2020-04-22T16:45:46","date_gmt":"2020-04-22T23:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=12842"},"modified":"2020-04-22T20:47:32","modified_gmt":"2020-04-23T03:47:32","slug":"the-wolfram-physics-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/22\/the-wolfram-physics-project\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wolfram Physics Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend Stephen Wolfram has come up with a new fundamental theory of physics. He\u2019s been meaning to do it for years. He sent me an introductory sketch or project announcement, entitled \u00a0\u201cFinally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics…and It\u2019s Beautiful\u201d\u009d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u201cHazmat Spring\u201d\u009d Acrylic on canvas, April, 2020, 40\u201d\u009d x 30\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The announcement came by email, very early in the morning of April 5, 2020. Exciting, and it was fun to think it’s true, me in the pouring rain in the dark before dawn in, yes, another plague year. I thought of Newton taking shelter on his family estate in 1665, and his insight that the force that drew the apple might reach as far as the Moon.<\/p>\n

My guess is that some in the physics community will be a little dubious and resistant to Wolfram\u2014–academics have never been fond of him. He\u2019s a mix of brashness and genius, not really such an unfamiliar type in the histories of mathematics and science. But it puts some people off.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always enjoyed Wolfram. I first met him in 1985 when I visited him at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study in order to write a popular article <\/a>about his new work on cellular automata or CAs.<\/p>\n

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Already in 1985, Wolfram had\u00a0 figured out the two basic principles that underlie his later tome A New Kind of Science<\/em>. (You can browse Wolfram’s book online<\/a>.) The two principles:<\/p>\n

(Principle of Computational Equivalence.) <\/em>All interesting natural processes are universally computing, and all are fundamentally equivalent. (A waving leaf is as intelligent as a human. A cloud is as smart as a pig.)<\/p>\n

(Principle of Computational Irreducibility.) <\/em>All interesting natural processes are computationally irreducible, that is, there are no shortcut methods to predict what they\u2019re going to do. (Weather prediction is never going to work. And you\u2019ll never learn to predict your moods.)<\/p>\n

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I am very much a disciple of Wolfram\u2019s, indeed I wrote my own tome about his ideas: The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.<\/em> You browse my book\u00a0 online <\/a>too. Stephen and I are out to spread the word.<\/p>\n

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[A 1D wave as a CA. The cellular automata images in this post are made with my CAPOW software, available for Windows on GitHub<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n

All along Wolfram thought that small, iterated computations could be a good model for physical phenomena. Early on I asked him what engineers thought of his method of modeling turbulence with CAs. His comeback: \u201cSome say it’s wrong, and some say it’s trivial. If you can get people to say both those things, you’re in quite good shape.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s in his new theory for the foundations of physics? It starts with the idea that a simple set of graph-rewriting rules can be started out on some minimal starting pattern like two dots connected by a line, and then, if the rules in the rule set are recursively applied and reapplied to successive outputs, the process will generate interestingly complex and gnarly patterns. Like watching a cellular automaton evolve. And this might be how our universe arises. So far this is a standard Wolfram move.<\/p>\n

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[Sculpture of Pythagoras at the Rosicrucian World Headquarters in my home town of San Jose.\u00a0 I’m not at all involved with the group, but I enjoy the gardens there and the Egyptian style decor. One of the few sights to see in old San Jo’.]<\/em><\/p>\n

But then, being Wolfram, he kicks it up a level and another level and another. He considers the option of running all the rules in his rule set at each step, and seeing what you get. A multiway rule, as it were. And then he suggests using all possible sets of rules and seeing what you get.<\/p>\n

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You\u2019d expect a tangled, mess, but somehow there emerges a single over-arching \u201cworld.\u201d\u009d In this world, each viewer \u201csees\u201d\u009d through the filter of their own particular update rules. And Wolfram calls this shared world \u201crulial <\/b>space\u201d\u009d, the space of all possible world rules.<\/p>\n

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The scope of Wolfram\u2019s ambition is boundless. And that\u2019s a good thing. He he knows he can\u2019t finish the work on his own. So he\u2019s started the Wolfram Physics Project<\/a>, and he invites one and all to study the material\u2014and to participate. There\u2019s an outside chance you, just as you are, might cook up some simple set of rules that…generate the entire universe! Go for it, dude. I\u2019ve been playing slot-machine with new CA rules for thirty-five years.<\/p>\n

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\u201cHappy Egg\u201d\u009d Acrylic on canvas, April, 2020, 40\u201d\u009d x 30\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em> More info on Rudy\u2019s Paintings <\/a>page.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s two tantalizing quotes from the end part of Wolfram\u2019s project announcement.<\/p>\n

(1) I\u2019ve always assumed that any entity that exists in our universe must at least \u201cexperience the same physics as us\u201d\u009d. But now I realize that this isn\u2019t true. There\u2019s actually an almost infinite diversity of different ways to describe and experience our universe, or in effect an almost infinite diversity of different \u201cplanes of existence\u201d\u009d for entities in the universe\u2014corresponding to different possible reference frames in rulial space, all ultimately connected by universal computation and rule-space relativity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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(2) But there is something perhaps more bizarre that is possible. While we view our universe\u2014and reality\u2014through our particular type of description language, there are endless other possible description languages which can lead to descriptions of reality that will seem coherent (and even in some appropriate definition \u201cmeaningful\u201d\u009d) within themselves, but which will seem to us to correspond to utterly incoherent and meaningless aspects of our universe.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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[Spherical painting by Dick Termes of Termespheres<\/a> fame.]<\/em><\/p>\n

This line of speculation segues into my ongoing SF obsession with describing thoughts of stars, wasps, atoms, stones, etc. I worked on this in my novels Postsingular <\/em>and Hylozoic<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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[A 2D continuous-valued reactino-diffusion CA made with CAPOW.]<\/em><\/p>\n

But there\u2019s hints of wilder, newer, even more, unheard-of ideas in Wolfram\u2019s words. And I\u2019m going to be pondering these inchoate notions over in the coming weeks and months and years. I like the notion of beings who see some things as coherent and meaningful\u2014even though we see them as incoherent and meaningless.<\/p>\n

In this context, I always come back to the chaotic wobbling of a little green plant I noticed on the bank of a stream in Big Sur. I included it in my short 2008 YouTube video, \u201cWhat Is Gnarl<\/a>?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n