[Link] Faster than Light in Our Model of Physics: Some Preliminary Thoughts—Stephen Wolfram Writings

I agree – it seems perfectly fine research, and, as you mention, novel.

I also think it's not only too early but besides the point to demand rigor at all. Or, it's fine to demand rigor, but no one's obligated to supply it – not even Wolfram or his team or the wider 'community'. It's fine to ignore them too!

But yes, it's unreasonable to expect a lot of rigor given how young this 'field' is.

I also thank that – *reasonably – our priors regarding the computational, i.e. practical, difficulty of simulating our universe (or something similar) at the level of 'space quanta' is immense. String theory seems to have run into similar problems – and it's been one of the premier fields in physics for decades.

AFAIK, our simulations of the Standard Model, or other quantum mechanical models, are extremely limited too. Why would we expect any more fundamental theory to be even that much more difficult to compute/simulate/analyze?

I think that, given the extremely young age of this topic of research, the kind of qualitative 'eyeball or ad-hoc program' analysis Wolfram provides in his published work is eminently sensible and reasonable. It should be very much exploratory at such an early stage.

The math is a bit advanced at times but the 'raw' research is much simpler – basically very simple computer programs, but lots of them.

This is Wolfram's big/unique trick (IMO): just enumerate literally all of the possibilities for some class or set of simple programs and, often first, look at some visualizations of the programs, e.g. their evolution, and look for patterns, first with your eyes/brain and then, incrementally, with more and more 'search' programs. If possible, one might find good 'mathematical' compressions of the data/info/behavior of the programs, and, more rarely, a good 'mechanistic' understanding as well.

He wrote and published a book – available free online here – that's a massive infodump of basically all of his thoughts and speculations after having performed his trick – and diligently recorded all kinds of interesting findings – on a whole bunch of different kinds of 'simple programs'. (And this apparently happened over decades.) He came up with a bunch of interesting and, to me, very plausible ideas about computation and its implications for a lot of other sciences. I found, and continue to find, it to be a hugely impressive intellectual achievement.

But the book – and now Wolfram as a person – has very much not been received as I did and have. Academics in particular have a number of objections, some (IMO) reasonable – e.g. Wolfram seems to claim originality for some ideas that definitely had been published earlier (in the 'academic literature') – and some (again, IMO) unreasonable – e.g. Wolfram doesn't write in a typical academic style or format.

Wolfram also is widely considered to be generally arrogant and self-centered. I don't find those charges to be that persuasive, or that significant or serious regardless.

(He's certainly not, on any scale, particularly bad along these dimensions. But I also don't have any personal problem that, e.g. Steve Jobs, was also arrogant, self-centered, and seemingly an extreme 'asshole'. It does seem like the kind of people that are like this are over-represented among people that are both (relatively and extremely, as well as publicly) 'successful' or 'important'. And this doesn't seem that unintuitive either.)

And that is my theory/model of the "negativity" that Wolfram elicits. (And the examples here on this post are pretty mild based on what I've found elsewhere.)

I think the bigger thing that he has – not demonstrated exactly – but accumulated tantalizing evidence for, is that Turing-completeness ('universal computation') is both easy and, surprisingly, common. I still think that's an under-appreciated point.

Yes.

I'd describe his 'main trick' as trying to find a simple computable system that mostly mimics the 'dynamics' of some other system.

The analogies seem very superficial to me. I mean, I would be impressed if he could derive the equation for Lorentz contraction, but I am unimpressed if he merely shows that "something can get shorter". Etc. Could you give me the best example of mimicking some specific law of physics?