Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
> Well, I don't know about this "informed discussion" business, but I can
> tell you he's wrong. Nothing in there explains "Why does anything exist
> at all?" I don't know where people got the idea this wasn't a
> legitimate question of physics, but nobody will ever get the complete
> laws written down, much less justified, without knowing the answer.
I think 'incomplete' would be more accurate. The ability to deduce most of modern physics based on nothing but a knowledge of mathematics and information theory may not be the ultimate answer, but it would be a huge step forward.
> Furthermore, this guy doesn't make any experimental predictions, and
> from what I understood, I doubt he ever will..
It looks to me like he's used his approach to derive at least one new law already (that turbulent-flow equation), and more should follow. You should be able to test the approach by generating such equations for phenomena where they do not currently exist, and then testing them.
IMHO this is pretty exiting stuff. I hope we see more predictions, and some experimental results, in the near future.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com