Stephen Wolfram
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Scientist and computational theorist
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Claims by Stephen Wolfram (20 of 48)
Fluid Laws Generic Across Different Molecules
The laws of fluid dynamics (Navier-Stokes) are essentially the same for air and for water despite the underlying molecules and their collision physics being entirely different, illustrating that large-scale laws can be generic and independent of microscopic detail, which is the same reason general relativity and quantum mechanics can be generic in the hypergraph models.
Quantum Computing Speedup May Be Illusory
It seems you can never win with quantum computing because when computation branches out across many threads in branchial space, the effort required for the observer to corral those threads back together to read the result is at least as great as the gain from the branching; if measurement is honestly accounted for, the apparent speedup may disappear.
High Entropy State Only Boring To Bounded Observer
The claim that the universe is heading toward a boring high-entropy state with no structure is an artifact of being a computationally bounded observer; a more capable observer might perceive the same gas-in-equilibrium state as amazingly complex microscopic structure, so 'high entropy' reflects the observer's inability to extract structure rather than an objective absence of it.
Completion Interpretation Of Quantum Mechanics
In the completion interpretation (due to Jonathan Gorard), a branching observer perceives a branching universe by corralling branches together — mathematically equivalating two branches to maintain the fiction that definite things happen — and causal invariance guarantees these branches will eventually merge so the observer's forced completions remain consistent; destructive interference occurs when a photon's paths land at opposite ends of branchial space so the observer cannot knit them together into a single photon.
Fermions Are Square Root Of Bosons
In the multiway graphs, bosons are conjectured to be associated with branchings that merge very quickly while fermions are associated with branchings that do not merge quickly and end up at opposite sides of branchial space; at a mathematical level fermions are like the square root of bosons because they branch without merging well, offering a route to deriving the spin statistics theorem.
Harmonic Oscillator Needs Closed Timelike Curves
Getting a perfect harmonic oscillator in these models requires closed timelike curves (the history of the universe repeating itself), which is a weird idealization; real physics probably has no perfect harmonic oscillators, illustrating that insisting on standard idealizations stresses the model just as deriving perfect rigid-body mechanics stresses molecular dynamics.
Computational Equivalence Above Low Threshold
The principle of computational equivalence holds that once a system passes a very low threshold of complexity, it immediately performs computations as sophisticated as anything can do; there is no gradual increase in sophistication with complexity, so almost any non-trivial program is already maximally computationally sophisticated and universal computation is ubiquitous.
CPT Invariance As Three Branchial Reflections
CPT invariance has a clean formulation in these models: charge conjugation is an inversion (reflection) in branchial space, parity is a reflection of physical space, and time reversal is a reflection in time, so CPT invariance corresponds to the multiway causal graph being invariant under reflection in all three directions, though it has not yet been shown that the models necessarily exhibit CPT invariance.
Entanglement Horizon Blocks Classical Thought
Black holes may have an entanglement horizon in branchial space outside the physical event horizon, and an observer at the entanglement horizon cannot form a classical thought (cannot collapse a wave function), so a distant observer would conclude such an observer can never determine outcomes — offering a qualitative handle on the black hole information paradox.
Cellular Automata Inappropriate For Fundamental Physics
Cellular automata, despite being fertile minimal models for many phenomena, are inappropriate for fundamental physics because they assume a pre-existing fixed notion of space and time, whereas fundamental physics requires going underneath those notions and building space and time from something more fundamental.
Maximum Entanglement Speed In Branchial Space
Just as a perturbation in physical space expands at the speed of light, a perturbation in branchial space expands at finite speed, implying a maximum entanglement speed in quantum mechanics (a very rough estimate being 10^5 solar masses per second); if correct, this would manifest as limits on very rapid mergers of large black holes and would mean Bell-inequality correlations, though seemingly instantaneous in physical space, are actually bounded propagation in branchial space.
Elementary Length Much Smaller Than Planck Length
In these models the elementary length is much smaller than the Planck length, and the Planck energy is understood not as the elementary energy but as an energy summed over all possible branches in the multiway causal graph, whereas the elementary energy is an individual causal edge in that graph, which clears up the puzzle of why the Planck energy is so large.
Black Hole Entropy Should Be Computable
Black hole entropy, understood as the number of microscopic states consistent with the macroscopic identification of a black hole, should in principle be computable in these models by counting threads of history in the multiway causal graph, though it is computationally hard due to the exponential number of branches, motivating the local multiway systems optimization being developed.
Everything Including Particles Made Of Space
In this framework the only thing in the universe is space; there is no background with things placed in it, so to have an electron you must make it out of features of the pattern of connections between the atoms of space rather than placing a separate object into space.
Space Is Made Of Discrete Relational Atoms
Space is not a pre-existing background in which things are placed; it is itself made of discrete disembodied points (atoms of space) that have no position, only relations (connections) to other points, and continuous-seeming space emerges from these relations only when viewed at large scale, analogous to how continuous fluids emerge from discrete molecules.
Simple Programs Produce Complex Behavior
When you pick a program at random in the computational universe, even a very simple program can produce extremely complicated behavior; this is the essence of how nature generates complexity, and it contradicts the intuition that simple programs always do simple things.
Universe Does Only Turing Computation Not Hypercomputation
A key prediction of the physics project is that what can be done in our universe is just computation achievable by a Turing machine and not hyper-computation; even if something infinitely more powerful than a Turing machine existed, it would be hidden behind a cosmological event horizon and could never be observed or interacted with.
Computational Irreducibility Limits Prediction
Many systems are computationally irreducible, meaning the only way to find out what they will do is to run every step, because the observer is itself a computational system that is computationally equivalent to the system being predicted and therefore cannot jump ahead or outsmart it.
Single Thread Of Experience Needed For Physics
Deriving the laws of physics we observe requires that observers maintain a single thread of experience through time and a notion of pure motion (maintaining identity while moving through space) even though the universe is being rewritten enormous numbers of times per second and a moving object is made of different atoms of space at its destination; these two attributes are what is needed to derive general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Local Gauge Invariance Likely Inevitable
It is looking very likely that local gauge invariance is an inevitable feature of these models, and it is conceivable the actual gauge group (perhaps a subgroup of E8) could be determined by the model even before the reason for three dimensions of space is understood.
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