I think its great the Wolfram’s approach has no free parameters and is not only fitting GR but is contributing to the algorithms used by physicists to model gravity. The thing about “free parameters” is really just saying something more like “This isn’t a class of theories, it is a particular theory.” Whenever you introduce a parameter you are really just stating a constraint on the class of theories implied by that parameter.
Regarding the “caloric” aphorism, I was really kind of disappointed that what Wolfram was really saying with his aphorism is more like:
“The ruliad will turn out to be the theory of everything including dark matter.”
He didn’t provide any specific argument for this explanation for dark matter in the video – it is pure conjecture. For instance, MOND has been dispatched by observations of clouds of dark matter from gravitational lensing. He didn’t address this. This “aphorism” it seems to me, is on the same order of rhetorical posturing as his repetitive resort to “computational irreducibility” which it would also seem to me is something as trivial as “there is no closed form solution to the vast majority of dynamical systems equations”. Oh? We didn’t know that to be the case ever since Newton/Leibniz, Stephen?
Having said that, it seems pretty obvious to me that whatever dark matter turns out to be, it had damn well better play the greatest part in alpha_G_proton. This is something everyone seems to be missing for some strange reason. They think they get away with not talking about the proton when talking about dark matter. What’s up with that? I mean it isn’t as though alpha_G_proton isn’t a well known parameter and it isn’t as though its relationship to 2^127 isn’t also known to be even more remarkable than Dirac’s or Eddington’s conjectures.
What’s wrong with these physicists?