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The Wolfram Physics Project Makes Me Queasy

Stephen Wolfram is…Stephen Wolfram.

Once a wunderkind student of Feynman, Wolfram is now best known for his software, Mathematica, a tool used by everyone from scientists to lazy college students. Almost all of my work is coded in Mathematica, and while it has some flaws (can someone please speed up the linear solver? Maple’s is so much better!) it still tends to be the best tool for the job.

Wolfram is also known for being a very strange person. There’s his tendency to name, or rename, things after himself. (There’s a type of Mathematica file that used to be called “.m”. Now by default they’re “.wl”, “Wolfram Language” files.) There’s his live-streamed meetings. And then there’s his physics.

In 2002, Wolfram wrote a book, “A New Kind of Science”, arguing that computational systems called cellular automata were going to revolutionize science. A few days ago, he released an update: a sprawling website for “The Wolfram Physics Project”. In it, he claims to have found a potential “theory of everything”, unifying general relativity and quantum physics in a cellular automata-like form.

If that gets your crackpot klaxons blaring, yeah, me too. But Wolfram was once a very promising physicist. And he has collaborators this time, who are currently promising physicists. So I should probably give him a fair reading.

On the other hand, his introduction for a technical audience is 448 pages long. I may have more time now due to COVID-19, but I still have a job, and it isn’t reading that.

So I compromised. I didn’t read his 448-page technical introduction. I read his 90-ish page blog post. The post is written for a non-technical audience, so I know it isn’t 100% accurate. But by seeing how someone chooses to promote their work, I can at least get an idea of what they value.

I started out optimistic, or at least trying to be. Wolfram starts with simple mathematical rules, and sees what kinds of structures they create. That’s not an unheard of strategy in theoretical physics, including in my own field. And the specific structures he’s looking at look weirdly familiar, a bit like a generalization of cluster algebras.

Reading along, though, I got more and more uneasy. That unease peaked when I saw him describe how his structures give rise to mass.

Wolfram had already argued that his structures obey special relativity. (For a critique of this claim, see this twitter thread.) He found a way to define energy and momentum in his system, as “fluxes of causal edges”. He picks out a particular “flux of causal edges”, one that corresponds to “just going forward in time”, and defines it as mass. Then he “derives” $E=mc^2$ , saying,

Sometimes in the standard formalism of physics, this relation by now seems more like a definition than something to derive. But in our model, it’s not just a definition, and in fact we can successfully derive it.

In “the standard formalism of physics”, $E=mc^2$ means “mass is the energy of an object at rest”. It means “mass is the energy of an object just going forward in time”. If the “standard formalism of physics” “just defines” $E=mc^2$ , so does Wolfram.

I haven’t read his technical summary. Maybe this isn’t really how his “derivation” works, maybe it’s just how he decided to summarize it. But it’s a pretty misleading summary, one that gives the reader entirely the wrong idea about some rather basic physics. It worries me, because both as a physicist and a blogger, he really should know better. I’m left wondering whether he meant to mislead, or whether instead he’s misleading himself.

That feeling kept recurring as I kept reading. There was nothing else as extreme as that passage, but a lot of pieces that felt like they were making a big deal about the wrong things, and ignoring what a physicist would find the most important questions.

I was tempted to get snarkier in this post, to throw in a reference to Lewis’s trilemma or some variant of the old quip that “what is new is not good; and what is good is not new”. For now, I’ll just say that I probably shouldn’t have read a 90 page pop physics treatise before lunch, and end the post with that.

My Other Brain (And My Other Other Brain)

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What does a theoretical physicist do all day? We sit and think.

Most of us can’t do all that thinking in our heads, though. Maybe Steven Hawking could, but the rest of us need to visualize what we’re thinking. Our memories, too, are all-too finite, prone to forget what we’re doing midway through a calculation.

So rather than just use our imagination and memory, we use another imagination, another memory: a piece of paper. Writing is the simplest “other brain” we have access to, but even by itself it’s a big improvement, adding weeks of memory and the ability to “see” long calculations at work.

But even augmented by writing, our brains are limited. We can only calculate so fast. What’s more, we get bored: doing the same thing mechanically over and over is not something our brains like to do.

Luckily, in the modern era we have access to other brains: computers.

As I write, the “other brain” sitting on my desk works out a long calculation. Using programs like Mathematica or Maple, or more serious programming languages, I can tell my “other brain” to do something and it will do it, quickly and without getting bored.

My “other brain” is limited too. It has only so much memory, only so much speed, it can only do so many calculations at once. While it’s thinking, though, I can find yet another brain to think at the same time. Sometimes that’s just my desktop, sitting back in my office in Denmark. Sometimes I have access to clusters, blobs of synchronized brains to do my bidding.

While I’m writing this, my “brains” are doing five different calculations (not counting any my “real brain” might be doing). I’m sitting and thinking, as a theoretical physicist should.

Romeo and Juliet, through a Wormhole

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Perimeter is hosting this year’s Mathematica Summer School on Theoretical Physics. The school is a mix of lectures on a topic in physics (this year, the phenomenon of quantum entanglement) and tips and tricks for using the symbolic calculation program Mathematica.

Juan Maldacena is one of the lecturers, which gave me a chance to hear his Romeo and Juliet-based explanation of the properties of wormholes. While I’ve criticized some of Maldacena’s science popularization work in the past, this one is pretty solid, so I thought I’d share it with you guys.

You probably think of wormholes as “shortcuts” to travel between two widely separated places. As it turns out, this isn’t really accurate: while “normal” wormholes do connect distant locations, they don’t do it in a way that allows astronauts to travel between them, Interstellar-style. This can be illustrated with something called a Penrose diagram:

Static “Greyish Black” Diagram

In the traditional Penrose diagram, time goes upward, while space goes from side to side. In order to measure both in the same units, we use the speed of light, so one year on the time axis corresponds to one light-year on the space axis. This means that if you’re traveling at a 45 degree line on the diagram, you’re going at the speed of light. Any lower angle is impossible, while any higher angle means you’re going slower.

If we start in “our universe” in the diagram, can we get to the “other universe”?

Pretty clearly, the answer is no. As long as we go slower than the speed of light, when we pass the event horizon of the wormhole we will end up, not in the “other universe”, but at the part of the diagram labeled Future Singularity, the singularity at the center of the black hole. Even going at the speed of light only keeps us orbiting the event horizon for all eternity, at best.

What use could such a wormhole be? Well, imagine you’re Romeo or Juliet.

Romeo has been banished from Verona, but he took one end of a wormhole with him, while the other end was left with Juliet. He can’t go through and visit her, she can’t go through and visit him. But if they’re already considering taking poison, there’s an easier way. If they both jump in to the wormhole, they’ll fall in to the singularity. Crucially, though, it’s the same singularity, so once they’re past the event horizon they can meet inside the black hole, spending some time together before the end.

Depicted here for more typical quantum protagonists, Alice and Bob.

This explains what wormholes really are: two black holes that share a center.

Why was Maldacena talking about this at a school on entanglement? Maldacena has recently conjectured that quantum entanglement and wormholes are two sides of the same phenomenon, that pairs of entangled particles are actually connected by wormholes. Crucially, these wormholes need to have the properties described above: you can’t use a pair of entangled particles to communicate information faster than light, and you can’t use a wormhole to travel faster than light. However, it is the “shared” singularity that ends up particularly useful, as it suggests a solution to the problem of black hole firewalls.

Firewalls were originally proposed as a way of getting around a particular paradox relating three states connected by quantum entanglement: a particle inside a black hole, radiation just outside the black hole, and radiation far away from the black hole. The way the paradox is set up, it appears that these three states must all be connected. As it turns out, though, this is prohibited by quantum mechanics, which only allows two states to be entangled at a time. The original solution proposed for this was a “firewall”, a situation in which anyone trying to observe all three states would “burn up” when crossing the event horizon, thus avoiding any observed contradiction. Maldacena’s conjecture suggests another way: if someone interacts with the far-away radiation, they have an effect on the black hole’s interior, because the two are connected by a wormhole! This ends up getting rid of the contradiction, allowing the observer to view the black hole and distant radiation as two different descriptions of the same state, and it depends crucially on the fact that a wormhole involves a shared singularity.

There’s still a lot of detail to be worked out, part of the reason why Maldacena presented this research here was to inspire more investigation from students. But it does seem encouraging that Romeo and Juliet might not have to face a wall of fire before being reunited.

Where Do the Experts Go When They Need an Expert?

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If your game crashes, or Windows keeps spitting out bizarre error messages, you google the problem. Chances are, you find someone on a help forum who had the same problem, and hopefully someone else posted the answer.

(If your preferred strategy is to ask a younger relative, then I’m sorry, but nine times out of ten they’re just doing that.)

What do scientists do, though? We’re at the cutting-edge of knowledge. When we have a problem, who do we turn to?

Typically, Stack Exchange.

The thing is, when we’re really confused about something, most of the time it’s not really a physics problem. We get mystified by the intricacies of Mathematica, or we need some quality trick from numerical methods. And while I haven’t done much with them yet, there are communities dedicated to answering actual physics questions, like Physics Overflow.

The idea I was working on last week? That came from a poster on the Mathematica Stack Exchange, who mentioned a handy little function called Association that I hadn’t heard of before. (It worked, by the way.)

Science is a collaborative process. Sometimes that means actual collaborators, but sometimes we need a little help from folks online, just like everyone else.

“Super” Computers: Using a Cluster

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When I join a new department or institute, the first thing I ask is “do we have a cluster?”

Most of what I do, I do on a computer. Gone are the days when theorists would always do all their work on notepads and chalkboards (though many still do!). Instead, we use specialized computer programs like Mathematica and Maple. Using a program helps keep us from forgetting pesky minus signs, and it allows working with equations far too long to fit on a sheet of paper.

Now if computers help, more computer should help more. Since physicists like to add “super” to things, what about a supercomputer?

The Jaguars of the computing world.

Supercomputers are great, but they’re also expensive. The people who use supercomputers are the ones who model large, complicated systems, like the weather, or supernovae. For most theorists, you still want power, but you don’t need quite that much. That’s where computer clusters come in.

A computer cluster is pretty much what it sounds like: several computers wired together. Different clusters contain different numbers of computers. For example, my department has a ten-node cluster. Sure, that doesn’t stack up to a supercomputer, but it’s still ten times as fast as an ordinary computer, right?

The power of ten computers!

Well, not exactly. As several of my friends have been surprised to learn, the computers on our cluster are actually slower than most of our laptops.

The power of ten old computers!

Still, ten older computers is still faster than one new one, yes?

Even then, it depends how you use it.

Run a normal task on a cluster, and it’s just going to run on one of the computers, which, as I’ve said, are slower than a modern laptop. You need to get smarter.

There are two big advantages of clusters: time, and parallelization.

Sometimes, you want to do a calculation that will take a long time. Your computer is going to be busy for a day or two, and that’s inconvenient when you want to do…well, pretty much anything else. A cluster is a space to run those long calculations. You put the calculation on one of the nodes, you go back to doing your work, and you check back in a day or two to see if it’s finished.

Clusters are at their most powerful when you can parallelize. If you need to do ten versions of the same calculation, each slightly different, then rather than doing them one at a time a cluster lets you do them all at once. At that point, it really is making you ten times faster.

If you ever program, I’d encourage you to look into the resources you have available. A cluster is a very handy thing to have access to, no matter what you’re doing!

Why we Physics

So what do you actually do?

4 gravitons

The trials and tribulations of four gravitons and a postdoc