Wolfram Physics: One Year Update: How’s It Going?

With a physics background, always found this somewhat ungraspable, but on it goes.  And now an update.   I have yet to hear that traditional physics is applauding this, so I guess that is still my main objection.   And I don't have the time to do my own fundamental research.   So here it is:

Wolfram Physics:  On Year Update:  How’s It Going?

When we launched the Wolfram Physics Project a year ago today, I was fairly certain that—to my great surprise—we’d finally found a path to a truly fundamental theory of physics, and it was beautiful. A year later it’s looking even better. We’ve been steadily understanding more and more about the structure and implications of our models—and they continue to fit beautifully with what we already know about physics, particularly connecting with some of the most elegant existing approaches, strengthening and extending them, and involving the communities that have developed them.

And if fundamental physics wasn’t enough, it’s also become clear that our models and formalism can be applied even beyond physics—suggesting major new approaches to several other fields, as well as allowing ideas and intuition from those fields to be brought to bear on understanding physics.

Needless to say, there is much hard work still to be done. But a year into the process I’m completely certain that we’re “climbing the right mountain”. And the view from where we are so far is already quite spectacular.

We’re still mostly at the stage of exploring the very rich structure of our models and their connections to existing theoretical frameworks. But we’re on a path to being able to make direct experimental predictions, even if it’ll be challenging to find ones accessible to present-day experiments. But quite independent of this, what we’ve done right now is already practical and useful—providing new streamlined methods for computing several important existing kinds of physics results.

The way I see what we’ve achieved so far is that it seems as if we’ve successfully found a structure for the “machine code” of the universe—the lowest-level processes from which all the richness of physics and everything else emerges. It certainly wasn’t obvious that any such “machine code” would exist. But I think we can now be confident that it does, and that in a sense our universe is fundamentally computational all the way down. But even though the foundations are different, the remarkable thing is that what emerges aligns with important mathematical structures we already know, enhancing and generalizing them.

From four decades of exploring the computational universe of possible programs, my most fundamental takeaway has been that even simple programs can produce immensely complex behavior, and that this behavior is usually computationally irreducible, in the sense that it can’t be predicted by anything much less than just running the explicit computation that produced it. And at the level of the machine code our models very much suggest that our universe will be full of such computational irreducibility.

But an important part of the way I now understand our Physics Projct is that it’s about what a computationally bounded observer (like us) can see in all this computational irreducibility. And the key point is that within the computational irreducibility there are inevitably slices of computational reducibility. And, remarkably, the three such slices we know correspond exactly to the great theories of existing physics: general relativity, quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics.

And in a sense, over the past year, I’ve increasingly come to view the whole fundamental story of science as being about the interplay between computational irreducibility and computational reducibility. The computational nature of things inevitably leads to computational irreducibility. But there are slices of computational reducibility that inevitably exist on top of this irreducibility that are what make it possible for us—as computationally bounded entities—to identify meaningful scientific laws and to do science.

There’s a part of this that leads quite directly to specific formal development, and for example specific mathematics. But there’s also a part that leads to a fundamentally new way of thinking about things, that for example provides new perspectives on issues like the nature of consciousness, that have in the past seemed largely in the domain of philosophy rather than science. ...