How to derive quantum mechanics from Wolfram Physics with Jonathan Gorard

Here’s the first of two crucial excerpts from my conversation with Jonathan Gorard.

The core idea of Wolfram Physics is that we can model the universe as a hypergraph. If we want this idea to be taken seriously, we’re going to have to derive physics from the hypergraph.

The twin pillars of physics, as we know it, are quantum mechanics and general relativity.

In this episode, Jonathan explains how quantum mechanics can be derived from the Wolfram model, indeed, how quantum mechanics unexpectedly fell out of the model.

It’s a fascinating story.

We start with the role of the observer. According to Jonathan, it turns out not to be necessary to narrow our focus to only causally invariant rules.

Why not? Because macroscopic observers like ourselves impose causal invariance through our coarse-graining of the hypergraph. In other words, by squinting at the universe, seeing only its large-scale features and glossing over the finer details, we reduce multiple paths through the multiway graph to a single timeline, and, in the process, impose causal invariance.

Jonathan goes on to explain that this coarse-graining can be modelled with completion rules. These are fake rules, similar to the true rules of Wolfram Physics, but posited solely to model the coarse-graining of the hypergraph by the observer.

And here’s the thing. According to Jonathan, these completion rules are formally equivalent to the collapse of the wavefunction in quantum mechanics. In other words, we finally have an explanation for how the observer causes the collapse of the wavefunction, reducing Schrödinger’s half live, half dead cat to one that’s either dead or alive.

If Jonathan’s right, then this is a true breakthrough, not just in quantum mechanics, but in the philosophy of physics.

In the next episode, we’ll move on to the other pillar of physics: Jonathan will explain how to derive general relativity from the hypergraph.

There’s much more to explain about each of these derivations, but we’re finally getting to the crux of Wolfram Physics, the question of whether it can, after all, model our universe.

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Jonathan’s seminal paper on how to derive quantum mechanics

Jonathan Gorard

Concepts mentioned by Jonathan

Stephen Wolfram’s books

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Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.

[nuprophett]

My intuition tells me that Wolfram physics is one of the best current tools that we may have for deepening our understanding of quantum physics. Even this video goes such a long way in explaining 'why' quantum physics appears the way it does to us without the need to invoke hand waving. I sincerely hope that the project gains (or already has) enough traction to keep going and receieve broader acceptance as a legitimate lens for evaluating the universe. There are already brilliant mind working on this, but there is a critical mass of exposure that a theory must achieve for it to continue on, even after its core founders and believers move on, that I hope Wolfram Physics reaches. I hope that humanity does not discard this diamond because it was not mined in the traditional bedrocks of knowledge.

[Sam-wezj]

Mind blowing. This is so much cleaner than say many worlds. When will the mainstream catch up?!

[tommysullivan]

You are my new So much of what you’ve just said in the first half has gone thru my mind. As a scientist I hesitate to say it but I really have a good gut feeling this is where the answers are, this philosophy and approach, u all are awesome thank u so much for sharing this!

[GPP_feature]

I thoroughly recommend viewers familiarise themselves with some information about the Ruliad, hypergraphs and how Wolfram physics developed. It certainly helped me appreciate Jonathan's explanations.
Thanks to all involved 👍💛

[matthewcox]

This is amazing! His mannerisms match Stephen Wolfram's so closely. They've clearly spent a lot of time together discussing computational irreducibility 😂. Brilliant interview!

[stormosone]

Such a good video! Thank you again for every one of these!

[peterhall]

Wow. Thanks for listing Jonathan's papers. I want to get my mind around this stunning insight.

[joshux]

Great video. Btw, I wish there's a long form interview

[MarkAhlquist]

13:45 Okay, but, in quantum mechanics they sum up infinite possibilities of particle behaviors, as most 'average out'. Maybe do something similar here?

[VladislavGoryachev]

I am an IT aficionado now studying Bitcoin protocols. Blockchain is a way to order events when there is no universal concept of time. I like to think that the universe is being bootstrapped in a similar fashion, and that process creates relativity and quantum paradoxes. I love Wolfram's ideas, but I find it unlikely that some external force is applying the rules regularly and simultaneously to all nodes and edges of the multigraph. I would rather consider that the evolution propagates locally by each node to its surrounding. Much like in colonies of microorganisms. Of course, such decentralized evolution would be much harder to formalize, study and simulate.

[DrEhrfurchtgebietend]

One thing that he glazes over here a bit is that he's talking about how the wave function collapse happens at a point in time. The wave function collapse can cause an event in the past. It's about squeezing all of the things together such that they're consistent. If there's something that is undetermined in the past until that time, that thing will then be determined

[gnagyusa]

Fascinating idea. There's a lot of overlap with Many Worlds.

[davidmcsween]

So the collapse at smaller than plank scales means hidden variables? Not so hidden anymore just unreachable? Is this the ether by another name?

[erawanpencil]

To a simple-minded fellow like me, this all just seems like swapping out synonyms in a different lingo... but the paradoxes/measurement problem remains. Is there a simpler way to explain what Wolfram's position is or does it necessarily have to be in his specific language?

[benbennit]

When / how can we prove this theory? It seems it can fit current physical laws and interpretations in... but can it predict or spit out new laws that we can test?

It feels so foundational you cannot output complexity without knowing the rules of a system first. Yes, so some things emerge beautifully, but has anything sprung up that we don't expect or can be recreated or investigated in a lab?

[mrpocock]

Not a physicist, but... if the observer is this operation that in some sense imposes equivalences over the raw network, then does that mean there's some analogue of entropy in play here? Different observations will correspond to smaller or larger collections of network states, and different next observations likewise. So there will be some internal pseudo-entropy process that drives sequences of observations to tend to be in some sense progressing in a typical pseudo-entropy nonreducing manner. And if you flip all the time arrows on the underlying graph, this same pseudo-entropy will likewise push the observer towards higher pseudo-entropy observations from lower pseudo-entropy ones. Whatever way you flip this notional arrow of time, the observer will experience it running "forwards", where the observer has some kind of access to "past" events and only some bounded prediction of "future" events, due to this pseudo-entropic bound on how the observer is bulking over the individual network states. In effect, the arrow of time reduces to the observer being "governed" by the pseudo-entropy statistic tending to be monotopic, even for random walks of the underlying network of states.

[LukeKendall-author]

Surely you'd only need to add an infinite number of steps if the universe is infinite rather than finite?

[mmjxtragood]

When did the universe get it's first observer?

[light]

Is the coarse-graining by observers related to the uncertainty principle in a way? Because if coarse-graining means equivalencing different branches of history, a human can always invent some kind of technology to make even tinier processes visible, potentially undoing some of the completion rules. But it seems like there is a limit to microscopy because of the uncertainty principle. So is that the level at which coarse-graining is happening? If that's the case, my problem with that would be, why exactly is coarse-graining happening at that scale, because if it depends on the observer, why isn't it already happening at a larger scale and could other observers with other completion rules look at even tinier processes, potentially enabeling us to bypass the uncertainty principle? Since I don't know anything about the completion rules, they seem kind of arbitrary.

[berniethejet]

Have Gorard or Wolfram addressed Scott Aaronson's various critiques of the Wolfram model?