I was just brought up to date on Stephen Wolfram’s project to find the key to the universe which he released online last year. He used many of the simplest math statements to generate entire universes with hundreds of thousands of outcomes.
The problem has become one of knowing which one is the closest to the universe we live in.
I dealt with a similar problem in biology. I’m not in Wolfram’s league; a man who understood Reimann tensors by age 13 is unique, and one who didn’t find enough stimulus at the Institute for Advanced Study in his early 20s is ahistoric.
My insight comes from visiting Dr. Donald A Glaser’s lab in the late 1970s at U.C. Berkeley. Dr. Glaser had laid out 1 million separate agar cells on a flat table with a moveable arm overhead that could visit and interact with every cell, quite fast. In each cell he placed a single bacterium. He then, in the case I saw, placed a drop of liquid on each bacterium and let it grow. He then photographed the resulting growth and ran the 1 million images to find clusters of common variance.
Dr. Glaser was applying the urine from thirty Stanford basketball team members where the mild illnesses of a dozen were known. The photos found the precise clusters of the cells where liquid from the specific dozen had been applied and Glaser knew from the shape of the bacteria which shape was connected to each illness. He could therefore predict the same future illnesses if they were reintroduced into the cell machine.
I thought it was brilliant. The NIH had given him a $5 million grant to build and test the machine but ended the grant after he wrote his final report.
In discussing this success/failure with my close friend Dr. Peter Sherrill, Peter explained a long verbal apocrypha in science that: making accurate predictions was not of interest to science if the mechanism was not understood. That was the case with Dr. Glaser’s machine.
It seems to me that that is the problem with Wolfram’s hundreds of thousands of automata created universes. He can’t predict which one must be the correct universe.
If he could take four objects from our universe, say neon, pi, a gamma ray and the 2.7K radiation and use those to predict the existence of radioactive decay I believe he would prove that one of his automata was the basis of the universe.
And most thinkers would agree.