5/20/2023 0 Comments Wolfram physics calculator![]() And the point that they’re trying to make is that some guesses lead to things that kinda look like the real world. And basically you have a guess as to what the rules are for how hypergraphs are updated. They’re starting with a kind of automata, a kind of discrete system, called a hypergraph, and generalizations thereof. What we’re trying to do is to start with the simplest, most stripped-down version of the best theory we currently understand, namely quantum mechanics, to start from almost nothing but quantum mechanics and see how things like space and time and matter and energy emerge from that fundamental description.Ġ:03:04.9 SC: Stephen Wolfram and his friends are trying to be way more ambitious than that. And mostly, I’m giving Stephen here the opportunity to explain those ideas, but there is a family resemblance between what he’s trying to do and what I and my collaborators are trying to do in quantum mechanics, stuff like that.Ġ:02:40.5 SC: So let me very briefly tell you how I see that relationship. I care about the substance of the actual ideas. So you’ll learn a lot in this podcast, we’re not going to talk about how the research was done or the fact that it was uploaded and shared with the world or whatever, you can draw your own conclusions about that. There were a lot of criticisms, and some kudos, about how he developed it sort of outside the mainstream of physics research and so forth, and then laid on us hundreds of pages of work with he and his collaborators at the same time.Ġ:02:02.0 SC: And it’s not the mainstream of theoretical physics, most physicists who are doing their own thing did not drop everything to work on it, but some became interested and they’re inviting people to help out. I wanted to focus the podcast on giving a sketch for what the main ideas are of the Wolfram Physics Project and how they are not yet fully developed but might be developed going down the line. Now, there’s a lot to say about this, and we don’t say everything in this podcast, even though it’s a long one. ![]() A few years ago, some years ago, he wrote a big book called A New Kind of Science, where he suggested that cellular automata might give a clue as to different ways of thinking about all sorts of science, right, biology, economics as well as physics.Ġ:01:14.7 SC: More recently, he has launched what is called the Wolfram Physics Project, which is simply an effort to start with almost nothing and get the fundamental laws of physics out of them. But he’s also still interested in fundamental physics. I use Mathematica all the time, many people in my field use Mathematica. So I invited Stephen Wolfram to be on the podcast.Ġ:00:26.0 SC: Now, Stephen Wolfram was a physics prodigy at a young age, one of the youngest winners of the MacArthur Genius Grant, started out in particle physics before he moved to think about complexity and cellular automata, maybe best known right now for inventing the Mathematica programming language and analysis system, as well as the underlying Wolfram language that was used to write it, and Wolfram Alpha answer engine. Other times, I think, “You know what? The people are right.” And in this case I think that they are. I love the people, but I don’t always agree with them. I get a lot of suggestions, and a lot of people suggest the same guest over and over again. And this is going to be one of those podcast episodes that people have been clamoring for, for a long time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |