I watched an interesting documentary series called Suppressed Science on Curiosity Stream recently. Actually, it's not so much about actual suppression, but about controversial science - bio-hacking, gene editing, alternative energy, AI, that kind of thing. The last episode was about Theories of Everything, the attempts by physicists to find a single all-encompassing theory that explains all aspects if the universe.
Personally, I've never really understood why physicists would expect or believe that such a thing would ever be possible. We currently have two very good theories - general relativity and quantum mechanics - that do a very good job of explaining how the universe works on very large and very small scales. Why should there be one overarching theory that incorporates the two? Why is one even needed?
Anyway, many physicists have spent their whole lives searching for such a Holy Grail. One such person is Stephen Wolfram, widely considered a maverick and iconoclast in physics circles. He is clearly a genius of rare talent, but his work on a Theory of Everything is just so different from anyone else's that other physicists just don't know how to treat it.
I will make no attempt to encapsulate his theory - his classic self-published book on the subject, the 1,200-page A New Kind of Science, became a best seller when it was released in 2002, but it is not easy going - and Wolfram's own attempts on the documentary to couch it in simple layperson's language left both me and the young interviewer glazing over with a wistful and uncomprehending smile. The general idea, though, is that nature runs on ultra-simple computational formulae, where the rules that govern the universe resemble lines of computer code.
Wolfram is a brilliant self-publicist and blessedly free from humility. But just because he has an unshakeable belief in his own legitimacy, does not mean that he is right. After several years out of the academic limelight, running his own successful software company, Wolfram came back a couple of years ago, announcing that his work showed "a path to the fundamental theory of physics". But physicists, other than a few close collaborators, have remained skeptical.
The main problem is that the theory is very theoretical(!) and it can't make any definite new predictions that can be experimentally tested. So, believing in Wolfram's theory is really no more scientific than believing in God. It has not so far been able to reproduce even the most basic quantitative predictions of conventional physics, critics say. Of course, Wolfram disagrees, claiming that, "We're able to reproduce special relativity, general relativity, and the core results of quantum mechanics". It seems like physicists will have to agree to disagree...
Some claim that Wolfram's base theory - that simple computational rules can lead to complex phenomena - is not even that novel, and that it does not take us much further than the work of Alan Turing, John von Neumann and John Conway before him (Conway came up with the cellular automaton known as the Game of Life). Wolfram, of course, disagrees.
Wolfram has that romantic aura of the heroic outsider single-handedly changing all of science, the lone genius labouring in obscurity and rejected by the establishment. But, as the Scientific American article notes, that's just not how scientific discoveries actually work. Even Albert Einstein collaborated and was in contact with other researchers of his day, as did the likes of Heisenberg, Bohr and Hawking. Even Andrew Wiles did not prove Fermat's Last Theorem in a vacuum, but by following the path laid by other mathematicians before him.
Certainly, a scientific field does not get revolutionized without the critical appraisal and validation of many peers, although Wolfram claims not to hold with all that: "I don't really believe in anonymous peer review". When faced with some of the responses to his work from other physicists, his response was, "I'm disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you're communicating. I deserve better." I think that says it all.
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