Stephen Wolfram: “I Understand Quantum Mechanics!” 

Wolfram has produced extensive volumes of content about his theories of hypergraphy as a quasi-computational ToE. Search his name with that word on RU-vid and you will find more substantial clips to chew on

artificial intelligence is the source.

The best thing I can suggest is to read the Technical Introduction over at the WolframPhysics page. It will introduce the ideas, with illustrations, that you need to understand what he's saying. It stays very light on the math, so while it can be a little mind-bending in places and you'll likely need to re-read some of it a couple of times, the math shouldn't be much of a challenge for most of the sort of people who would be interested in this.

The person you refer to as a "maths/software guy" did his PhD in particle physics. His thesis committee was composed of Richard Feynman, Peter Goldreich, Frank J. Sciulli and Steven Frautschi, and chaired by Richard D. Field. He published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production and nine other papers. His work with Geoffrey C. Fox on the theory of the strong interaction is still used in experimental particle physics.

@@mmaximk and you love Wikipedia so what’s your point?

He is speaking of computation in an exclusively theoretical way as to model what’s going on in the physical universe. This is nothing other than what we’ve been doing in physics before; who or what is evolving the laws of nature through spacetime? It is a silly, metaphysical question we’ll never know the answer to because there is, by definition, no way of measuring/observing anything about the metaphysical.

@@Ruktiet Right. What experiment would even be possible? None. This is just atheist's version of god.

"Atheist's version of god", I like this. Also, "Consciousness" could be atheist's version of soul.

@@Ruktiet Entropy is not "metaphysical."

@@picksalot1 He was referring to computation as the mechanism. That is new age metaphysical talk.

Yes, that is nonsense. ;-)

Yes, that was a joke by Feynman and that is how you should treat it. Quantum mechanics is very easy to understand, but not for people who are only staring at paper. You have to experience it in the lab and then it will become very obvious in a very short amount of time what it is really about.

@@lepidoptera9337 Hi, no it is not. Luckily I m also studying physics so I also have something to say. The mathematics of QM and learning to do calculations is easy to master I agree with this. But by the term “understand” we mean the making sense of on the intiuitive level. Is it something you can relate to your everyday experiences and your everyday perception of the world? The answer is simply no because our everyday perception is misleading not because QM is misleading. And I think Wolframs explanations about what QM is all about based on making his classical view of the world primary and trying to come up with a story that will make sense to him and everyone else on the level of everyday perception of the world. That is why he is not gonna be successful , because he doesnt take the quantum mechanics seriously enough, he is still biased and wanna make sense of the world based on classical mechanics’ framework.

Seems to be a reformulation of the fact that the speed of a object in spacetime is always c. What you use as speed through space is taken from your speed through time.

He's very interesting - Wolfram is unique

its interesting idea no doubt but the problem with it is then what is computational effort then , who is computing it, this looks like simulation hypothesis, basically what wolfram is saying is the speed of light is just rendering speed of universe.

@@benjaminfrank9294 its a better formulation than clubbing space-time as one entity which is absolutely weird thing to do as wolfram said, I think wolfram is onto something, but what he is onto makes discovering theory of everything pointless because philosophically there are infinite multiverses with infinite different laws and our universe just happens to be one of them, the laws of our universe are just random from that perspective, its only we who try to fit in structure to them, so the theory of everything is that everything exists somewhere in a singular existence which you can term as a real infinity unlike the mathematical infinities.

@@vik24oct1991 Seth Lloyd "The universe is computing all the time - bits are flipping with every interaction" What is it computing ? "It is computing its future state from its present sate"

But we don't model gravity as acting from outside the objects in the system. Gravity is an emergent property of mass curving the fabric of spacetime, hell, even time only exists because of objects having mass, and space exists because there are objects existing in relation to each other.

it doesn't need energy, there is no such thing as real energy like he says but illusion of it, he is saying that computation is fundamental quantity in existence rest all are derived from it, including time, space, energy everything are derived from computation, for example if a particles is moving in space, it seems to us that it has an energy but actually its just a series of computations at the fundamental level which we perceive as energy , momentum, velocity etc.

@@vik24oct1991 I understood that, but still the core questions remain. "Computation is a fundamental quantity"? Where does he get that? Where does that come from? What kind of computation? And how(algo)? I get his ideas are abstract way of presenting something he has in mind but there are plenty of similar other ideas like his, which are just that, ideas. At best plausible nothing more. His ideas of 'everything computation' misses some serious crucial feature of modern physics and in my opinion doesn't have anything to do with reality. Causality may be point to point network and energy and etc are emergent but this is just another way of presenting nothing else. It does not say anything new or reveal reality at a deeper level. How does computation happen? By itself? And somehow everything else tumbles out? Not so easy. So from the physics' perspective one has to take energy into account for computation. He is basically into math and software and wants to dig into physics, good, but I think he is missing very crucial physics. His abstract theory is a very hand-wavy kind of explaining everything and supposedly covering relativity and QM but my guess is it fails at the moment of creation- bigbang and inside blackhole. Iam sure his theory fails to explain gravity. However, I remember, Heisenberg once had a theory of everything of his own dismissed by Pauli. There is a beautiful story/anecdote attached. Another point, in your comment, "if a particle is moving in space... " Where does the particle come from? (What kind of computation and how) and you presupposed "space". So moving in already existing space then. If so how come this is a theory of everything? An important question. So nope! I am not convinced. At the ideas' s level we can imagine so many things like Wolfarm & others do but reality is Hard! I have already written so much so concluding with Freeman Dyson' opinion about wolfarm's idea here. "There's a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories, ...Wolfarm is unusual in that he's doing this in his 40s." Needless to say his theories are still not accepted by the scientific community nor has been confirmed by the experiment. Just a tentative idea, and remains just that. REALITY IS HARD, PHYSICS IS HARD, QM IS NOT EASY TO UNDERSTAND.

@@BikianaBiswas from what I understand, wolfram’s theory philosophically arises from infinite multi universe theory, most fundamental question we ask of our universe is “why is it like this not anything else” , the simple philosophical answer to this is “it’s simply one of infinite many universes which follow different laws or no laws for that matter”, the reason this is a satisfactory answer because its tackles the arbitrariness of the laws of physics we see in our universe by saying it’s not arbitrary at all, everything else also exists and our universe is one of the versions of it, now what wolfram physics or physics in general assumes is that our universe follows certain mathematical laws by chance (it need not in reality) and proceeds to learn the laws, wolfram physics tries to “generate” these laws starting out from simple computations evolving into complex computational structure which hopefully can match what we see in reality, it’s a pure mathematical approach to physics so when he says computation is fundamental entity it’s only for mathematical convenience not necessarily what is true in reality but we can never know that about anything in reality, universe need not have any laws and or fundamental principles in truth, these all emerge as universe evolves only by chance. So computation being fundamental entity of wolfram physics is just for convenience, as he believes our universe can be derived by computational evolution alone so it’s reasonable to assume so. I think the theory is intractable as they are infinite rules among which one set can be of our universe and to choose a rule which best describes our universe seems very unlikely as you can only check if the rules are correct by evolving them to level they match experiment, and most times these types of computations are irreducible so you have to compute through multiple steps to evolve the theory you cannot analytically reduce the evolutions, so it’s not really a promising theory of physics imo as it will never finish the evolution to find the fundamental laws of our universe. I think physicists already believe that most of universe is mathematical hence wolfram’s idea that it’s an evolution of simple computations is already implied just like you can create a complex equation by addition multiplication etc, the real motivation of physics is computational reduction, that is explain universe by equations which are analytical don’t need lot of simulations to predict something, what wolfram is doing is not much value as it will simply prove that universe is a computation but will not reduce the complexity of the computation , in algorithmic terms what wolfram’s theory will tell you is the rule for Fibonacci series that next number is sum of previous two numbers, but this is already known by physicist about universe, they are interested in closed form of Fibonacci series which will reduce the computational complexity of it.

Keep in mind that this is taking the Conway's game of life simulation idea and searching for the computational rules of our universe. By definition then, there is a computation happening along the time direction. If you think of c as the speed of causality, then it matches here as the slope of the "light cone" that starts at some event and along the time axis spreads out into the space dimensions. A neighboring point can be affected on the next compute cycle. It's neighbors on the cycle after that. So far so good and he explained that before. This available compute thing is new to me. In the conway case there is always enough compute. But here everything is emergent from their underlying hypergraph model. So maybe a way to think about it is an object "at rest" has a regular clock ticking at one tick per computation cycle. At relativistic speeds the computation is proceeding mostly in the space like direction? So multiple updates along space with fewer and fewer time updates as you approach c? I am lost on this though. My simplistic Conway mental model is no longer adequate. My guess above would imply that unlike conway there is no fixed size "computational duration" along the time axis. The rest object has more time passing per tick, the relativistic object has smaller time axis tics? So the limit as you approach c is zero time tics on board the object? But more and more updates in space? That would be a kind of way to "run out of computation"?

@@dirkbester9050 Thank you for the reply. This is such a huge shift in perspective and probably is going to be as opaque for me as string theory. I think he said there were 10^^400 threads of computation available so this is another kind of string theory, sorry bad pun, I wonder what's next, a yarn theory? I could at least get a glimmer of a hint of an intuition with general relativity but string theory and now this, it's hopeless but fascinating to try.

@@dirkbester9050 The problem here is your time axis. Time is localized and subjective for every object (this is why we get time dilation around massive objects, since they curve spacetime), so they will each have their individual time axis. What you want to calculate is their progression on a timelike (sub-lightspeed) curve in relation to the timelike curves of objects it will at any point during its existence interact with.

That's only applicable if there is a causal relationship between the events. The sequence of an independent event A and B happening is dependent on where they interact with an observer on the observer's own time axis. On timelike curves, there's usually very seldom the sequence of events will differ between observers, but on spacelike curves (which are mathematically viable but hypothetically improbable) there is a bigger likelihood that the events can happen in a different sequence to observers.

He is one of those people who have a hammer and to whom everything looks like a nail. In reality nature doesn't do any computations at all. Only humans need computations to describe what nature does without.

How original

No. Branchial

Quantum mechanics never had foundational problems. Most people simply don't read the literature carefully.

​​@lepidoptera9337 thank you for your comment, but if you are not more specific, it is difficult to know what you mean. The foundational problems meaning QM is incomplete, also in agreement with Penrose it is inconsistent, if you do the experiments properly, you will understand. See i.e.: 1912.11362 in arXiv by C.S. Unnikrishnan; Ninad R. Jetty 2022 J. Opt. 24 035201.

Thanks so much! *What was your favorite takeaway from this conversation?* _Please join my mailing list to get _*_FREE_*_ notes & resources from this show! Click_ 👉 briankeating.com/list

impossible using his formalism

Totally

Nonsense.

@@rogerphelps9939 Get triggered 😂 EZ

and what was that?

It is the latter.

I did computer science. I understand computation. I don't know much about physics, being a first year peasant only. In what way does physical chemistry let you understand the physics here?

@@dirkbester9050 I don't claim I am a nuclear physics scientist but I understand a lot about chemistry, atoms, bonds, Brownian movement,..., so if this talk is directed at audience with basic knowledge in physics, I assume I am part of that audience. What's frustrating is that these scientists live in their own bubble and they congratulate each other about achievements!

Quantum mechanics is nonsense, don't believe these fraud scientists. They are there to just make money using lies.

Without understanding Quantum mechanics, don't you think it is a wild stretch to infer such implications like person who understands it would control the world😅.

yes

because she is using up all of her energy to change position that the quantum computational system system is not updating in time

well, he has come up with his own idea that is not the standard theory.

Well, after a quick search, I answered my own question. From an article in Scientific American May 6, 2020: "But Wolfram’s model’s ability to incorporate currently accepted physics is not necessarily that impressive. “It’s this sort of infinitely flexible philosophy where, regardless of what anyone said was true about physics, they could then assert, ‘Oh, yeah, you could graft something like that onto our model,’” says Scott Aaronson, a quantum computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. When asked about such criticisms, Gorard agrees-toa point. “We’re just kind of fitting things,” he says. “But we're only doing that so we can actually go and do a systematized search” for specific rules that fit those of our universe. Wolfram and Gorard have not yet found any computational rules meeting those requirements, however. And without those rules, they cannot make any definite, concrete new predictions that could be experimentally tested. Indeed, according to critics, Wolfram’s model has yet to even reproduce the most basic quantitative predictions of conventional physics. “The experimental predictions of [quantum physics and general relativity] have been confirmed to many decimal places-in some cases, to a precision of one part in [10 billion],” says Daniel Harlow, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So far I see no indication that this could be done using the simple kinds of [computational rules] advocated by Wolfram. The successes he claims are, at best, qualitative.” Further, even that qualitative success is limited: There are crucial features of modern physics missing from the model. And the parts of physics that it can qualitatively reproduce are mostly there because Wolfram and his colleagues put them in to begin with. This arrangement is akin to announcing, “‘If we suppose that a rabbit was coming out of the hat, then remarkably, this rabbit would be coming out of the hat,’” Aaronson says. “And then [going] on and on about how remarkable it is.” I know he is a really smart guy with all sorts of credentials, but he sounded a bit to confident about something this big. "Trust those who seek the truth, but doubt those who say that they have found it."

It's not highly regarded, mostly because it's not yet developed far enough that it can make any prediction anywhere near as well as currently accepted theories. The scale of the structures it describes are astonishingly tiny, so it'll be a while (if ever) before it can be used to calculate actual physics. It seems like it might be more useful for suggesting ideas for mathematical approaches to unsolved problems in existing theories than as a physical theory itself.

ha ha. That's all we need is something more obscure than QM.

@@bustercam199 i know right. I guess we will never know in our lifetimes due to the impossibility of actually measuring outside the limits of present theories.

@@drgetwrekt869 and that's the problem. We have to remember this is physics and not philosophy of what one can or cannot do or learn from measurement. The underlying physics itself is more accessible and approachable than what most physicists want to admit.

Hahaha! Comment of the week. 🫡🥂

Yup, we are all inside a fever dream!

Yeah, but what did your nonlocal self conclude?

lol, i like his idea, but that's the part that makes me most nervous. What is branchial space?

He doesn't have a working bullshit meter. If he had one, it would always be at 100% whenever he speaks. ;-)

@@ericmichel3857 Bingo.

Bingo.

@@ericmichel3857 you would trust them about what exactly?

It's not conservative and dissipative. It's reversible and irreversible, but at least you are halfway there.

Fields are more physical than what we imagine as particles, just as in QFT

Gravity is more like an emergent property of mass interacting with the fabric of spacetime. Also, space only exists because there are objects that exist in relation to each other (the Leibnizian interpretation). Without any mass to inhabit the universe, space would not exist. It's kind of like how matter wouldn't exist if there wasn't a Higgs field in place to slow down particles enough to give them mass, and therefore not having to travel at the speed of light, which is the fate of massless particles (like photons).

@@marfmarfalot5193 All the concepts, such as fields, are a way to understand what is going on. They are models. That they work well is known and important, but they are in the end mathematical descriptions.

@@shoujahatsumetsu That is an interpretation. Can you prove it? Just like there are many interpretations of quantum mechanics. The debate still rages. Leibnitz had none of the observational evidence we have today. These are more metaphysical concepts than physics.

Good question

Space and time are not orthogonal. Space gives us three degrees of freedom. Time doesn't give us any degree of freedom at all. The reason why the two are geometrically related in relativity is because of the way energy flows in space: it has a tendency to occupy the maximum available volume. In free space that means it flows homogeneously and isotropically "outward".

How do you stand still in space?

@theadvocatespodcast your space coordinates don't change.

@@SandipChitale relative to what? Everything is moving. Nothing stands still...

@@theadvocatespodcast You know right? that in SR it is said that the time moves the fastest when you are not moving. But yes, at some level I do agree that SR makes every thought about stillness meaningless in some sense. The Dialect channel on RU-vid discusses these including the notion of inertia and rotating bucket experiment. Yes, I was speaking slightly loosely. One way to think about it is in the sense of spacetime distance between events in the equation s^2 = t^2 - (x^2+y^2+z^2) where the (x^2+y^2+z^2) term is zero (whatever that may mean).

you can absolutely stand still in time, but for that you need zero kinetic energy which is impossible, time is simply function of what we call energy, there is no energy there is no time, truly speaking time is not even a fundamental thing at the level of space to share a coordinate system, its like somehow class 5 student is attending class 6, time is just byproduct of human memory not something which is out there in the universe, we look at the changes in state of universe and compare with our memory of previous state and say time has passed, if in between the state didn't change then we would say no time passed, state changes are driven by energy.

This is nonsense.

And some math still needs to be worked out

We know

You're more likely to have delirious thoughts than to be some sort chosen one who knows the secrets of the universe

@@flanderstruck3751 far more likely to be a delusion, I agree… Still, the math works out perfectly, in every way. And in many surprising ways….

grow some balls and post up then boii. imagine you are chillin in the comments section saying you got the math and receipts but no receipts are posted.

@@Emperor-Of-Elba page 120 of the book so far.

What is it?

@@NicholasWilliams-kd3eb, Verifying the Origin of Everything.