Any new theory should be taken with a heavy dose of skepticism. The more radical the theory, the more skeptical one should be. Crackpots abound and there's real, important work to be done within the so called Standard Model of physics.
Stephen Wolfram is not a crackpot. At 15 Stephan began research in quantum field theory and was publishing in peer-reviewed scientific journals like Nuovo Cimento and Physical Review D. He earned his PhD in physics from Cal Tech in 1980 at the age of 20. In 1981 he became the youngest recipient of the MacArthur Fellowships; just 21 years old. Stephen was the understudy of famed physicist Richard Feynman who called the young scholar 'astonishing'. After his work at Cal Tech, Wolfram would go on to create the programming language Mathematica (now the Wolfram Language) published and sold by Wolfram Research, of which he is still acting CEO.
Academic pedigree and professional accomplishments do not give one's ideas a hall-pass. Many in the physics community have been reluctant to take Stephen Wolfram's project seriously. But a few are starting to take notice. On July 12th 2021, widely published theoretical physicist Sean Carrol invited Stephen onto his popular Mindscape podcast to discuss the project. By the end of the over 2.5 hour explication Carroll's interest is clearly peaked.
The Wolfram Physics project has drawn intense interest from a small community of contributing physicists and computer scientists. So far the research has yielded fascinating results. An explanation for the arrow of time as updating rules being applied to our hyper-graph. The weirdness of quantum mechanics made comprehensible through multiway branches and branchial graphs. Dimensions as a variable, emergent large-scale feature of the hyper-graph. Consciousness as the sequentialized interpretation of a parallelized computationally irreducible process. Wolfram indicates that academic paper submissions are forthcoming.
We are forced to consider that it is at least possible we are witnessing the birth of a true theory (or program) of everything.
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