The undergraduates invited Stephen Wolfram last thursday to give the physics colloquium. It was very strange.
For those who don’t know, about five years or so ago Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, released a ridiculously large book called “A New Kind of Science.” This book is entirely too large, so I have not read it (see also “The Bell Curve”). So I will have to rely on others who have read, and on his colloquium it to summarize what I understand are some of his points.
The first one is that complex phenomena can be emergent from incredibly simple laws/rules. I don’t think this is a point that anybody really argues with. In fact, I think a lot of current condensed matter theory relies on precisely this fact. In his talk, he spent a lot of time (way too much actually) emphasizing this point. His shtick is cellular automata, some of which can produce ridiculously pseudo-random looking patterns based on very simple rules for how the cells grow. So he spent a lot of time showing very pretty pictures of these automata, which was fine enough.
At some point, the talk took a very weird turn, and he started blatantly advertising the newest version of Mathematica. It really was strange, because the features he was advertising (in real time, on his computer), had seemingly nothing to do with the talk he was giving. Then he said something like: “for the past few years, we have been working on a new piece of software which will accomplish what nobody thought possible. It’s going to be huge and possibly change all of your lives.” He did not elaborate.
After this point, I began to sense frustration from the audience, as it had been forty five minutes, and the man hadn’t actually said anything. All the while, he had been promising to elaborate on his biggest and most suspect claim of the very large book: the simple rules of cellular automata can somehow generate fundamental laws of physics. Finally, with about ten minutes left, he made a series of grandiose claims without elaboration; somehow with cellular automata, the theories of special and general relativity can somehow be derived.
Now, I don’t doubt that Wolfram is a very smart man, smarter than I will ever be. He got his Ph.D. in physics at 20 or something, he invented mathematica. But if you are giving a talk to a physics audience and you have a claim like “GR can be derived from cellular automata,” well, you’d better spent your entire alloted time justifying that claim instead of inappropriately shilling for your software program. Because, if true (which I think I, and most real physicists are very skeptical about), it is ridiculously interesting.
The talk ended with a bit of awkwardness; Wolfram had gone over his time, but was very interested in taking questions from the audience. After a few of them, the undergraduate host tried to get him to stop. Wolfram pleaded for more time, but eventually the undergraduate just cut him off, nobody came out looking well from the exchange.
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7 responses so far ↓
paulmohr // May 10, 2008 at 11:42 am
I have had some time using Wolfram’s software and studying his background and I would say he is right. The nice thing about artificial intelligence is that is has no social, personal or economic agenda that influences the results. It is part of a larger picture of technology, where software in the form of things like bot nets and Beowulf clusters can do some things that are unexpected in their emergence. The internet and the connectivity between people and new ideas itself is an emergent phenomenon. Thanks for the article.
Blake Stacey // May 10, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Thursday evening, I met with some fellow MIT alums and current residents of our old living group for drinks, and one of the undergrads explained how Wolfram got invited. The Society of Physics Students was trying to pick somebody to invite, and nobody could think of good choices. In a Puckish mood, my friend suggested several names which turned out to belong to physicists recently deceased. Then, he proposed Stephen Wolfram, and in default of better nominations. . . .
Scott Aaronson showed (arXiv:quant-ph/0206089) that, as far as he could understand Wolfram’s claims, you can get CAs to produce either something which looks like quantum mechanics or something which looks like relativity, but not both. If you try to make your emergent behaviors obey special relativity, they also obey the Bell Inequality, instead of violating it like a good quantum theory should.
The bothersome fact is that whether or not a person’s software package works as advertised has nothing to do with whether their speculations about physics are correct. Much of what Wolfram says about “emergence” is, as Dave pointed out, non-controversial — the exception is the grandiose part about the universe being a CA. The non-controversial stuff isn’t even Wolfram’s contribution: In the early 1960s, Feynman was lecturing his Caltech freshmen about laws of physics reproducing or not reproducing themselves at higher scales (classical laws do, quantum ones don’t). A few years after that, Wilson formalized the concept of renormalization group methods. Cellular automata were studied by people before Wolfram (names like von Neumann spring to mind). The interesting result contained in Wolfram’s doorstopper book is that a certain CA can be used to make a Universal Turing Machine, and this result was proved by Matthew Cook, not Wolfram.
Andre // May 10, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Your only required source for NKS analysis and commentary, from Cosma Shalizi:
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/
Alejandro Rivero // May 11, 2008 at 7:22 am
When I was an undergraduate in the late eighties, we had tabletop discussion about the CA thing, and if they could be scaled into a continous limit, or related to quantisation, or whatever. Then, to discover that not only one but two or three horrible papers of Wolfram had been published in the PhysReview was a real shock.
Nick // May 11, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Damn. That book looked really interesting at first glance. Although I guess I should have wondered what he filled the rest of those 1100-some pages with or why it was hanging out in the bookstore for $10.
Tim // May 12, 2008 at 2:47 pm
The only really offensive thing seems to be his advertising mma (without even elucidating the new feature(s) - this just seems tawdry). BUT: the level of effront ought to be judged by the amount of speaker’s fees paid. If he came otherwise pro-bono, what’s the problem?
For example, people happily pay RMS just to come “advertise” his product.
That Aaronson paper was great btw, thx Blake.
un1crom // May 28, 2008 at 10:36 am
That’s a pretty harsh criticism of Wolfram’s work without having actually read the source material.
No doubt other commenters are right that contributions have been made by others and that Wolfram doesn’t really have any special claim to CA or emergence. However, you do have to give him credit for doing the basic grunt work so we can investigate these claims. Again, he hasn’t done all that work himself…
Also, on advertising Mathematica. My only problem with that ever is that anyone in mathematics and science already knows how cool/useful (and expensive) it is. So there’s really no point in wasting the breath pointing out basic upgrades. That said, some of the newest features are fairly cool and I expect the dynamic manipulates will allow younger and younger scientists to explore ever more challenging problems.
Also, in the commonly cited review on the umich.edu site there’s plenty of bias. Railing against wolfram for working independently and being a “crank” really adds nothing to the critique of the theories and ideas. Newton, Godel and many other important thinkers were also cranks. Many inventors/scientist/entreprenuers are also cranks (Edison, Ford, Tesla, Marconi, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs…
shrouded in secrecy, lawsuits and employees who do the grunt work. Guess what, sometimes that’s just the way it works and none of the grunt workers are victims.
This is not a defense for Wolfram or any real commentary on his speech. It’s really a call out that reading the source material and critique should focus on the ideas.
Lastly, a book is hopelessly out of date by the time it is printed. To not dig into material because he contains some outdated, incorrect, or sloppy facts suggests we shouldn’t ever study any of the classic works or material from a previous generation. This book doesn’t set any discipline back (as the cited review suggests) and it is worth a read if only for exposure to one set of ideas.
RFS
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