I'd love to hear your opinion once you've form it...
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Replying to @cmuratori
You may know this already, but just in case someone is reading along who doesn't, I'll briefly explain why I don't understand why Wolfram thinks (as he said in the blog post) that his model explains energy, because energy is not a big mystery. 1/n
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Replying to @deguerre @cmuratori
Imagine for a moment that the entire universe is just a 1D line with two particles on it which move somehow. Then the "physics" of this system, any quantities you care about, are some function of how the particles are moving. 2/n
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Replying to @deguerre @cmuratori
Pick a point on the line and call it x=0. The position of the particles are x1 and x2. Then... we'll only go up to first time derivatives here for illustration any meaningful quantity is a function of x1, x2, x1' and x2'. 3/n
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Replying to @deguerre @cmuratori
But that point that we chose to be x=0 is arbitrary. The universe doesn't actually come with an origin. So in reality, any physically meaningful quantity should only depend on the difference in position x2-x1. 4/n
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Replying to @deguerre @cmuratori
We can handle this by either reducing the number of variables (e.g. define one of the particles to be the origin) or by imposing a constraint c(x1,x2,x1',x2')=0. 5/n
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Replying to @deguerre @cmuratori
For lots of particles it makes more sense to do the latter. And it turns out that in Newtonian space, "the universe has no coordinate system origin" imposes the constraint "momentum is conserved". 6/n
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Replying to @deguerre @cmuratori
Conservation of momentum is not a mystery. It's just an artifact of imposing a coordinate system on a universe that doesn't have a natural one. Similarly, there is no natural orientation so angular momentum is also conserved. 7/n
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Replying to @deguerre @cmuratori
Energy is a similar thing. It's a quantity that must be conserved because the universe doesn't come with a natural time origin t=0. There is no mystery here. Emmy Noether worked it out over 100 years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem … 8/8
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Replying to @deguerre @cmuratori
To play Devil's Advocate (or perhaps Wolfram's advocate), the structures he proposes do not seem to have such symmetries and thus constants of motion. Therefore a different explanation would be needed.
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(as an aside, Wolfram's Advocate is a wonderful term that should be used more often)
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