[chiralSPO (OP)]

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/

If you don't care about the personal aspect, scroll down to "How it works" in. the link above.

I have only worked my way through about half of this, but I am quite intrigued...


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[Bored chemist]

Is it just me who expects the graphs to continue for a dozen or so iterations, and become Mickey Mouse or some such?

[evan_au]

I think that Wolfram was fascinated by the game of "Life", played on a 2-dimensional board.
- By selecting suitable starting patterns, it could produce complex patterns
- Some extremely complex patterns could manufacture an unlimited number of "gliders", which propagated off "to infinity"
- But to see a glider factory in operation, you had to watch over many generations
- The mathematician Conway (who invented this game) saw some patterns reminiscent of life
See the "Glider Gun" at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

Wolfram has discovered a more complex game, which can be considered to play in more dimensions
- He even discovered some patterns that can break off separate pieces
- Although I didn't see any examples that could manufacture an unlimited series of other pieces
- By selecting suitable starting patterns, Wolfram claims to have discovered patterns reminiscent of Spacetime, Relativity, Black holes and Quantum theory

It's sort of a computational model of the universe.

[Feigenbaum]

This looks like the Mandelbrot set talking to the spatial dimensions.

[yor_on]

Yes, it's close to fractals and chaos theory. I like the way he write " If we ignore all matter in the universe, our universe is basically a big chunk of space. But what is that space? We’ve had mathematical idealizations and abstractions of it for two thousand years. But what really is it? Is it made of something, and if so, what?

Well, I think it’s very much like the picture above. A whole bunch of what are essentially abstract points, abstractly connected together. Except that in the picture there are 6704 of these points, whereas in our real universe there might be more like 10⁴⁰⁰ of them, or even many more. "


That connects to how a universe can come to be without a single origin, to me, and my idea of those points connecting to each other, creating a universe. But it also depends on how he imagine this 'writing' to be done. Seems to me that he doesn't explain how / where this writings  'origin' comes to be? And that one is important if you want it to fit a universe without a defined origin. You can't say that it starts 'there' and then write /apply on / to 'this', if I'm thinking right. It won't fit the way I understand this universe to come into existence anyway.

Then again, that may be a question of what times arrow is.
=

" In our model, the universe can start as a tiny hypergraph—perhaps a single self-loop. But then—as the rule gets applied—it progressively expands. With some particularly simple rules, the total size of the hypergraph has to just uniformly increase; with others it can fluctuate. "

Seems to me that you need a arrow of time before it, to let that happen, you need a causality chain already established and that is a arrow.  In a universe without a origin and a universe in where it won't matter where you are or at what time, for it to be the exact same, it doesn't seem enough to define it as 'growing' from this original hypergraph 'unfolding' its rules. I would like those nodes to be existent everywhere myself, with the 'connectiveness' being what creates and expands a universe Then again, that one isn't straightforward either, maybe you can't avoid a causality chain as a prerequisite.

[Bill S]

If I understood the maths, I suspect I would be impressed.  As usual, the trouble seems to come from trying to unify mathematical veracity and physical “reality”. 

Yor_on puts a finger straight on the problem.

Yes, it's close to fractals and chaos theory. I like the way he write " If we ignore all matter in the universe, our universe is basically a big chunk of space. But what is that space? We’ve had mathematical idealizations and abstractions of it for two thousand years. But what really is it? Is it made of something, and if so, what?

If we ignore all matter in the universe, how can we describe it as “a big chunk of space”?  Perhaps it could be argued that we are not supposed to ignore radiation, for example, but isn’t radiation energy?  Isn’t energy and matter interchangeable?  It seems we must be left with absolutely nothing in this universe.  Can you have a big chunk of “absolutely” nothing?   

But what really is it? Is it made of something, and if so, what?

If it’s not made of “something”, it must be made of “nothing”, which, manifestly, is nonsense.

Seems to me that you need a arrow of time before it, to let that happen, you need a causality chain already established and that is a arrow.

Spot on!  This brings us back to the hackneyed theme of something from nothing, and once you get back to “nothing” you are stuck.