April 5, 2020

Answered by: Stephen Wolfram

How could your model be proved wrong?

Any particular rule could be proved wrong by disagreeing with observations, for example predicting particles that do not exist. But the overall framework of our models is something more general, and not as directly amenable to experimental falsification. Asking how to falsify our framework is similar to asking how one would prove that calculus could not be a model for physics. An obvious answer would be another model successfully providing a fundamental theory of physics, and being proved incompatible.

There are, however, some structural features of our models which are unavoidable. One of them is the assertion that hypercomputation is not physically realizable. But quite how we—with human perception and actuation capabilities—could explicitly set up and interpret hypercomputation is quite unclear.