And from tiny, structureless rules out were coming space, time, relativity, gravity and hints of quantum mechanics. We reproduced, more elegantly, what I had done in the 1990s. And it wasn’t long before we started finding what I might call “very interesting things”.
It helped that-after a lifetime of developing them-we now had great computational tools. So-along with the two young physicists who’d encouraged me-I began in earnest in October 2019. But wonderful things were happening with the Wolfram Language, and I was busy thinking about all the implications of finally having a full-scale computational language.īut then, at our annual Summer School in 2019, there were two young physicists (Jonathan Gorard and Max Piskunov) who were like, “You just have to pursue this!” Physics had been my great passion when I was young, and in August 2019 I had a big birthday and realized that, yes, after all these years I really should see if I can make something work. Finally I had something that felt right to me as a serious possibility for how physics might work. But what was most important about it to me was that it was so elegant and minimal. It was in some ways simple and obvious, if very abstract. Until, suddenly, in the fall of 2018, I had a little idea. And every so often I’d wonder if they might be relevant for physics. In my life as a computational language designer I was constantly thinking about abstract systems of rules. The particular way I’d set up my rules seemed a little too inflexible, too contrived. It didn’t help that there was something that bothered me about my ideas.
There’d be polite interest, but basically the feeling was that finding a fundamental theory of physics was just too hard, and only kooks would attempt it. From time to time I would see physicist friends of mine, and I’d talk about my physics project. But pretty soon I got swept up in building Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language and everything around it. I always wanted to mount a big project to take my ideas further. Our rules would have to operate at some lower level, and all of physics would just have to emerge.īy the early 1990s I had a definite idea about how the rules might work, and by the end of the 1990s I had figured out quite a bit about their implications for space, time, gravity and other things in physics-and, basically as an example of what one might be able to do with science based on studying the computational universe, I devoted nearly 100 pages to this in my book A New Kind of Science. And somehow I think I imagined that if there was a fundamental theory, it would inevitably be very complicated.īut in the early 1980s, when I started studying the computational universe of simple programs I made what was for me a very surprising and important discovery: that even when the underlying rules for a system are extremely simple, the behavior of the system as a whole can be essentially arbitrarily rich and complex.Īnd this got me thinking: Could the universe work this way? Could it in fact be that underneath all of this richness and complexity we see in physics there are just simple rules? I soon realized that if that was going to be the case, we’d in effect have to go underneath space and time and basically everything we know. But even with everything that’s been done-and it’s very impressive-we still, after all this time, don’t have a truly fundamental theory of physics.īack when I used do theoretical physics for a living, I must admit I didn’t think much about trying to find a fundamental theory I was more concerned about what we could figure out based on the theories we had. In many ways it’s the ultimate question in natural science: How does our universe work? Is there a fundamental theory? An incredible amount has been figured out about physics over the past few hundred years. And it’s much more wonderful, and beautiful, than I’d ever imagined. But it’s just in the last few months that it’s finally come together. To be fair, at some level I’ve been working towards this for nearly 50 years.
It’s unexpected, surprising-and for me incredibly exciting. How We Got Here: The Backstory of the Wolfram Physics Project
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