Question

Stephen Wolfram claims to deduce the field equations from cellular automata, has anyone seen the actual mathematics?

Answer 1

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In his new blog post Stephen Wolfram claims that he can derive general relativity from cellular automata..

Answer 2

Wolfram's early work on cellular automata (CAs) has been useful in some didactical ways. The 1D CAs defined by Wolfram can be seen as minimalistic models for systems with many degrees of freedom and a thermodynamic limit. Insofar these CAs are based on a mixing discrete local dynamics, deterministic chaos results.

Apart from these didactical achievements, Wolfram's work on CAs has not resulted in anything tangible. This statement can be extended to a much broader group of CAs, and even holds for lattice gas automata (LGAs), dedicated CAs for hydrodynamic simulations. LGAs have never delivered on their initial promise of providing a method to simulate turbulence. A derivative system (Lattice Boltzmann - not a CA) has some applications in flow simulation.

It is against this background that NKS was released with much fanfare. Not surprisingly, reception by the scientific community has been negative. The book contains no new results (the result that the 'rule 110 CA' is Turing complete was proven years earlier by Wolfram's research assistant Matthew Cook), and has had zero impact on other fields of physics. I recently saw a pile of NKS copies for sale for less than $ 10 in my local Half Price Books store.