Talk:Mathematical universe hypothesis

Theory?

While I find Tegmark's proposals intriguing, I dispute calling this one a "theory". It's more of a provacative proposal that future theories adopt a particular and controversial featureCH (talk) 21:44, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Isn't this just one of those ideas that occurs to pretty much everyone independently at some time or another? At least to philosophy students or distracted physics undergrads.

I'm not sure what "feature" you are referring to. Tegmark's "everything" or UE is frequently discussed as a potential TOE (for example in "New Scientist" magazine http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/toe_frames.html or... http://scienceweek.com/2003/sc031031-1.htm). It appears to be a theory rather than a tautology (which it is sometimes derided as). Please elaborate on what you mean by "feature" and why it should not be referred to as a TOE. In the meantime I'm going to remove the "feature of" insertion.Joncolvin 07:24, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Being non-falsifiable, this proposal would not even qualify as science, let alone as a theory of everything. It is perhaps a "theory of everything" in a philosophical sense, but not in a scientific sense. Intriguing and attractive as it is, there is no way that experiment could possibly shed any light on the matter and therefore it lies outside the realms of science. Robin S 01:06, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

An extremely positivist viewpoint, Robin. This theory does in fact make predictions: one such prediction is that physics will become more "mathematical" as it progresses deeper towards the ultimate TOE. To date this prediction has been successful. Tegmark does not pretend that his theory is science; it is metaphysics, but metaphysics of a predictive nature. It bridges science and philosophy in a similar manner to the anthropic principle. Joncolvin 05:44, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

The last point of criticism "is self-contradictory because one cannot subsume all possible (partly contradictory) mathematical structures into one structure" is the result of a misunderstanding and has no bearing. The Ultimate Ensemble is not "one structure" ... the parts have absolutely no relation to each other. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.179.98.125 (talk) 03:25, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

This is a wikipedia article, not a research paper. It correctly reports what criticisms other physicists have made---there is even a citation showing you where this criticism was made. Just as a matter of interest, however, if the different parts have absolutely no relation to each other, and we are "in" one part, then presumably you agree with the criticism that the proposal is unverifiable, since we could never find any empirical evidence of the existence of the other, absolutely unrelated, parts. Dark Formal (talk) 05:24, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Relation to Schmidhuber's ultimate ensemble

Apparently both Max Tegmark's ensemble and Jürgen Schmidhuber's ensemble of all computable universes were published in 1997. Their relation should probably be clarified. Discrepancy (talk) 20:50, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Inadequate "Responses" section

The Criticisms section has three subsections. The first two are criticisms and the third is entitled "Responses". It's good to have a "Responses" subsection, but it needs to summarise Tegmark's answers to the two attacks. It's unsatisfactory just to point the reader to Tegmark's book as if the article was a teaser campaign. I suggest that somebody who has read the book gives a short precis here of the relevant arguments. Tommy Herbert (talk) 22:25, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

The theory is well defined if you write it this way

The "Criticisms" section says: "Some argue that the "set of all mathematical structures" is not well-defined."

The Kolmogorov_complexity of the universe is 0, but the Kolmogorov_complexity of any part of the universe is more than 0. This means that if the universe was able to be converted to a form the computer would take as input, and if zip files were better optimized, then the universe would compress to a 0 byte zip file. This does not mean it could be represented as 0s and 1s or as a file at all. It means there is no total information because it all balances to 0. Many things decrease Kolmogorov_complexity as they get bigger. For example, "all integers" has more integers than "all integers except 107 and 30", but the Kolmogorov_complexity of "all integers except 107 and 30" is bigger. Similarly, if the universe includes all math structures, then that is very simple to describe: The Kolmogorov_complexity of the universe is 0. Also, the Kolmogorov_complexity of nonexistance is 0, which means if Max Tegmark's theory is true, then the universe does not exist. Its simple. BenRayfield (talk) 19:19, 5 March 2010 (UTC)