Re:The Wolfram Physics Project
by jiggawatts on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:31AM
(#22876549)
> We need to narrow down on specifics
I have an unfounded suspicion that there exists a simple algebra akin to a continuous geometric algebra that allows all of physics and only physics.
Something that's bothered me for years about contemporary physics is the use of constraints "on top of" a general purpose algebra over the infinite precision real or complex numbers.
Mathematicians would argue that it's all "equivalent", but to me it feels arbitrary and in a sense missing the point. The final theory whatever it is, shouldn't sound like "everything except almost everything leaving one thing". It should sound like "this one thing only, that can be no other thing".
A friend of mine once put it this way: Ask a mathematician to describe a Rubik's Cube and he'll start with the space of all possible transformations, whittle it down to some space of discrete modular transformations by throwing out all other continuous and infinite transformations, then by throwing out even more transformations eventually wind up with a set of rules that matches a Rubik's Cube. If you ask him to draw what it looks like he'll start spouting about how that's impossible and you just need to "learn the maths", pointing at a stack of textbooks.
I have an unfounded suspicion that there exists a simple algebra akin to a continuous geometric algebra that allows all of physics and only physics.
Something that's bothered me for years about contemporary physics is the use of constraints "on top of" a general purpose algebra over the infinite precision real or complex numbers.
Mathematicians would argue that it's all "equivalent", but to me it feels arbitrary and in a sense missing the point. The final theory whatever it is, shouldn't sound like "everything except almost everything leaving one thing". It should sound like "this one thing only, that can be no other thing".
A friend of mine once put it this way: Ask a mathematician to describe a Rubik's Cube and he'll start with the space of all possible transformations, whittle it down to some space of discrete modular transformations by throwing out all other continuous and infinite transformations, then by throwing out even more transformations eventually wind up with a set of rules that matches a Rubik's Cube. If you ask him to draw what it looks like he'll start spouting about how that's impossible and you just need to "learn the maths", pointing at a stack of textbooks.
Modern theoretical physics has the same problem.