alt Hacker NewsWhat absurd definition are you using that makes Stephen Wolfram not a physicist?
Wolfram is more of a physicist than most physicists.
Wikipedia:
He entered St. John's College, Oxford, at age 17 and left in 1978[17] without graduating[18][19] to attend the California Institute of Technology the following year, where he received a PhD[20] in particle physics in 1980.[21] Wolfram's thesis committee was composed of Richard Feynman, Peter Goldreich, Frank J. Sciulli and Steven Frautschi, and chaired by Richard D. Field.[21][22]
In the mid-1980s, Wolfram worked on simulations of physical processes (such as turbulent fluid flow) with cellular automata on the Connection Machine alongside Richard Feynman[29] and helped initiate the field of complex systems.[citation needed] In 1984, he was a participant in the Founding Workshops of the Santa Fe Institute, along with Nobel laureates Murray Gell-Mann, Manfred Eigen, and Philip Warren Anderson, and future laureate Frank Wilczek.[30] In 1986, he founded the Center for Complex Systems Research (CCSR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[31] In 1987, he founded the journal Complex Systems.[31]
From 1992 to 2002, Wolfram worked on his controversial book A New Kind of Science,[4][33] which presents an empirical study of simple computational systems. Additionally, it argues that for fundamental reasons these types of systems, rather than traditional mathematics, are needed to model and understand complexity in nature. Wolfram's conclusion is that the universe is discrete in its nature, and runs on fundamental laws which can be described as simple programs. He predicts that a realization of this within scientific communities will have a revolutionary influence on physics, chemistry, biology, and a majority of scientific areas in general, hence the book's title
Replies
Wofram was a child prodigy but he quit physics.
It's not like you can stop doing something as a young person and be relevant or be competent just because you are smart. "A New Kind of Science" is not very deep book. It's graphically beautiful, but it contains lots of hand waving.
He has gradually descended into crackpot regime.
You are right.
But let's reduce it down to physicists working in quantum gravity, who publish in journals that such physicists typically publish in. Give that this is Sabine's background, this is who she will be aware of. For all that he's done, I'm pretty sure that Wolfram's works have not been published in such journals.
Roger Penrose is an even better example. His claims to be a physicist include a Nobel prize. But people working in quantum gravity dismiss his theories, so he doesn't publish in the right places, and so Sabine didn't think of him.
In short, Sabine is only likely to think of people in this context because their scientific work intersected hers.