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Trying to grasp the essence of the Wolfram Physics Project

Posted 6 years ago
POSTED BY: Spenser Spam
4 Replies
Posted 6 years ago

The problem is not that arXiv is full of pseudo-science; it's that most of so-called foundational physics research (including cosmological history, interpretations of quantum mechanics, and quantum gravity) is pseudo-science. I think it's very unfortunate that Stephen refers to there being the 'fundamental' theory of physics.i don't believe there is 'a' (let alone 'the') fundamental theory of physics (read the theoretical pluralism view of Boltzmann - see the Sci. Am. blog by John Horgan https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/pluralism-beyond-the-one-and-only-truth/) and even if it exists then as P.W. Anderson, a doyen of 'emergent physics' noted that "the ability to reduce everything to fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe." Personally, I read physics articles based on the authors rather than on the subjects, taking the view that good people do good research.

POSTED BY: Updating Name

Well arXiv is full of pseudo-science as far as I am concerned and is not in any way a good argument. Unless you believe that the multiverse hypothesis makes any predictions or is a proven fact. Unless you have seen LHC evidence for super-symmetry and the landscape. Publishing ideas do not turn them into a scientific framework. Again, ideas and theoretical constructs are not facts unless proven by evidence. If a set of ideas do not make any testable predictions it falls in the category of 'not even wrong'. A lot of fun, but not science.

I don't mean to be rude or pedantic about all this, you know. Just that there is a lot of fluff these days. Misinformation and too many claims starting with 'Science says...' or 'Scientists have discovered...'. Feel free to believe in the anthropic principle, the holographic universe, graph-based quantum gravity. If a believe claims to be a scientific fact, that's where I feel obliged to make a note. In any case, this forum is not the place to discuss this I guess and I'm the last person who wishes a mud-fight.

Francois: your comments contain several misstatements that indicate a lack of understanding of the way science works. (1) " Strictly speaking, the Wolfram Physics project isn’t science." This is wrong. The project does employ a different (but by no means unique) way of doing science (one might call it 'group science' or 'collaborative science' or some such terminology), but it is most definitely science. It is not necessary that any one publication to contain theory, predictions, falsifiable experiments and observations. In factThere is no one universally accepted definition of what science is but Scotus Justice Potter Stewart view on pornography "I know it when I see [read] it" works fine. (2) "by bypassing the peer-review system you automatically put yourself outside the scientific community.". this is, and has been for some time, not true. The use of arXiv does bypass peer-review but it is a well-accepted means of scientific publication (it is not simply aa format for pre-publication). it was designed specifically to allow material to become available to the scientific community without undue (and often unhelpful) delay that peer review entails (you might look at Einstein's comment on peer review (see https://theconversation.com/hate-the-peer-review-process-einstein-did-too-27405). In fact, peer review (more specifically, anonymous review) is more commonly used to censure, rather than improve, scientific publications (and the reviewers are more commonly not one's colleagues, but ones competitors). In the modern era of 'social media' there is absolutely no reason to hold up or prevent publication (at meetings of the APS, presentations are not reviewed or chosen. all are accepted) of anything (other than the laws of libel, slander and defamation).

POSTED BY: Richard Gaylord
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