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The Wolfram Physics Project: the First Two Weeks—Stephen Wolfram Writings ≡ 6/21/2020 The Wolfram Physics Project: The First Two Weeks—Stephen Wolfram Writings ≡ RECENT | CATEGORIES | The Wolfram Physics Project: The First Two Weeks April 29, 2020 Project Announcement: Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics… and It’s Beautiful Website: Wolfram Physics Project First, Thank You! We launched the Wolfram Physics Project two weeks ago, on April 14. And, in a word, wow! People might think that interest in fundamental science has waned. But the thousands of messages we’ve received tell a very different story. People really care! They’re excited. They’re enjoying understanding what we’ve figured out. They’re appreciating the elegance of it. They want to support the project. They want to get involved. It’s tremendously encouraging—and motivating. I wanted this project to be something for the world—and something lots of people could participate in. And it’s working. Our livestreams—even very technical ones—have been exceptionally popular. We’ve had lots of physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists and others asking questions, making suggestions and offering help. We’ve had lots of students and others who tell us how eager they are to get into doing research on the project. And we’ve had lots of people who just want to tell us they appreciate what we’re doing. So, thank you! https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/the-wolfram-physics-project-the-first-two-weeks/ 1/35 6/21/2020 The Wolfram Physics Project: The First Two Weeks—Stephen Wolfram Writings Real-Time Science Science is usually done behind closed doors. But not this project. This project is an open project where we’re sharing—in as real time as we can—what we’re doing and the tools we’re using. In the last two weeks, we’ve done more than 25 hours of livestreams about the project. We’ve given introductions to the project—both lecture style and Q&A. We’ve done detailed technical sessions. And we’ve started livestreaming our actual working research sessions. And in a couple of those sessions we’ve made the beginnings of some real discoveries—live and in public. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/the-wolfram-physics-project-the-first-two-weeks/ 2/35 6/21/2020 The Wolfram Physics Project: The First Two Weeks—Stephen Wolfram Writings It’s pretty cool to see thousands of people joining us to experience real-time science. (Our peak so far was nearly 8000 simultaneous viewers, and a fairly technical 2-hour session ended up being watched for a total of more than three-quarters of a million minutes.) And we’re starting to see serious “public collaboration” happening, in real time. People are making technical suggestions, sending us links to relevant papers, even sending us pieces of Wolfram Language code to run—all in real time. One of the great—and unexpected—things about the project is how well what we’ve discovered seems to dovetail with existing initiatives (like string theory, holographic principles, spin networks, higher categories, twistor theory, etc.) We’re keen to understand more about this, so one of the things we’ll be doing is having livestreamed discussions with experts in these various areas. The Summer School Approaches It’s only been two weeks since our project was launched—and there’ve already been some interesting things written about it that have helped sharpen my philosophical understanding. There hasn’t yet been time for serious scientific work to have been completed around the project… but we know people are on this path. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/the-wolfram-physics-project-the-first-two-weeks/ 3/35 6/21/2020 The Wolfram Physics Project: The First Two Weeks—Stephen Wolfram Writings We also know that there are lots of people who want to get to the point where they can make serious contributions to the project. And to help with that, we’ve got an educational program coming up: we’ve added a Fundamental Physics track to our annual Wolfram Summer School. Our Summer School—which has been running since 2003—is a 3-week program, focused on every participant doing a unique, original project. For the Fundamental Physics track, we’re going to have a “week 0” (June 22–27) that will be lectures and workshops about the Physics Project, followed by a 3-week project-based program (June 28–July 17). https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/the-wolfram-physics-project-the-first-two-weeks/ 4/35 6/21/2020 The Wolfram Physics Project: The First Two Weeks—Stephen Wolfram Writings This year’s Summer School will (for the first time) be online (though synchronous), so it’s going to be easier for students from around the world to attend. Many of the students for the Fundamental Physics track will be graduate students or postdocs, but we also expect to have students who are more junior, as well as professors and professionals. Since announcing the program last week, we’ve already received many good applications… but we’re going to try to expand the program to accommodate everyone who makes sense. (So if you’re thinking of applying, please just apply… though do it as soon as you can!) I’m very excited about what’s going to be achieved at the Summer School. I never expected our whole project to develop as well—or as quickly—as it has. But at this point I think we’ve developed an approach and a methodology that are going to make possible rapid progress in many directions. And I’m fully expecting that there’ll be projects at the Summer School that lead, for example, to academic papers that rapidly become classics. This is one of those rare times when there’s a lot of exceptionally juicy low-hanging fruit— and I’m looking forward to helping outstanding students find and pick that scientific fruit at our Summer School. New Science in the First Two Weeks It’s not too surprising that much of our time in the first two weeks after launching the project has been spent on “interfacing with the world”—explaining what we’re doing, trying to respond to thousands of messages, and setting up internal and external systems that can make future interactions easier. But we’ve been very keen to go on working on the science, and some of that has been happening too. We’ve so far done five livestreamed working sessions, three on spin and charge, one on the interplay with distributed computing, and one on combinators and physics. Of course, this is just what we’re directly working on ourselves. We’ve also already helped several people get started on projects that use their expertise—in physics, mathematics or computer science—and it’s wonderful to see the beginning of this kind of “scaling up”. But let me talk a bit about things I think I’ve learned in the past two weeks. Some of this comes from the working sessions we’ve had; some is in response to questions at our Q&As https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/the-wolfram-physics-project-the-first-two-weeks/ 5/35 6/21/2020 The Wolfram Physics Project: The First Two Weeks—Stephen Wolfram Writings and some is just the result of my slowly growing understanding—particularly helped by my efforts in explaining the project to people. What Is Angular Momentum? OK, so here’s something concrete that came out of our working session last Thursday: I think we understand what angular momentum is. Here’s part of where we figured that out: We already figured out a few months ago what linear momentum is. If you want to know the amount of linear momentum in a particular direction at a particular place in the hypergraph, you just have to see how much “activity” at that place in the hypergraph is being transferred in that “direction”. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/the-wolfram-physics-project-the-first-two-weeks/ 6/35 6/21/2020 The Wolfram Physics Project: The First Two Weeks—Stephen Wolfram Writings Directions are defined by geodesics that give the shortest path between one point and another. Momentum in a particular direction then corresponds to the extent to which an update at one point leads to updates at nearby points along that direction. (More formally, the statement is that momentum is given by the flux of causal edges through timelike hypersurfaces.) OK, so how about angular momentum? Well, it took us a total of nearly 6 hours, over three sessions, but here’s what we figured out. (And kudos to Jonathan Gorard for having had a crucial idea.) So, first, what’s the usual concept of angular momentum in physics? It’s all about turning. It’s all about momentum that doesn’t add up to go in any particular direction but just circulates around. Here’s the picture we used on the livestream: Imagine this is a fluid, like water. The fluid isn’t flowing in a particular direction. Instead, it’s just circulating around, creating a vortex. And this vortex has angular momentum. But what might the analog of this be in a hypergraph? To figure this out, we have to understand what rotation really is. It took us a little while to untangle this, but in the end it’s very simple. In any number of dimensions, a rotation is something that takes two vectors rooted at a particular point, and transforms one into the other. On the livestream, we used the simple example: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/the-wolfram-physics-project-the-first-two-weeks/ 7/35 6/21/2020 The Wolfram Physics Project: The First Two Weeks—Stephen Wolfram Writings And in the act of transforming one of these vectors into the other we’re essentially sweeping out a plane.
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