155 | Stephen Wolfram on Computation, Hypergraphs, and Fundamental Physics

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2021

⏱️ 161 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s not easy, figuring out the fundamental laws of physics. It’s even harder when your chosen methodology is to essentially start from scratch, positing a simple underlying system and a simple set of rules for it, and hope that everything we know about the world somehow pops out. That’s the project being undertaken by Stephen Wolfram and his collaborators, who are working with a kind of discrete system called “hypergraphs.” We talk about what the basic ideas are, why one would choose this particular angle of attack on fundamental physics, and how ideas like quantum mechanics and general relativity might emerge from this simple framework.

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Stephen Wolfram received his Ph.D. in physics from Caltech. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, and the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language. Among his awards are a MacArthur Fellowship. Among his books is A New Kind of Science. He recently launched the Wolfram Physics Project.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and this is going to be one of those podcast episodes
0:06.3	That people have been clamoring for for a long time and get a lot of suggestions and a lot of people suggest the same guest over and over again
0:13.7	Sometimes I ignore the people, you know, I love the people, but I don't always agree with them other times
0:18.2	I think you know what the people are right and in this case I think that they are so I invited Stephen Wolfram to be on the podcast now
0:26.1	Stephen Wolfram was a physics prodigy at a young age one of the youngest winners of the MacArthur genius grant started out in
0:34.0	Particle physics before he moved to think about complexity and cellular automata
0:39.6	Maybe best known right now for inventing the Mathematica programming language and analysis system as well as the underlying Wolfram
0:48.9	Language that was used to write it and Wolfram Alfred answer engine
0:52.4	I use Mathematica all the time many people in my field use Mathematica, but he's also still interested in fundamental physics
1:00.5	A few years ago some years ago he wrote a big book called a new kind of science where he suggested that cellular automata
1:07.6	Might give a clue as to different ways of thinking about all sorts of science right biology economics as well as physics
1:14.6	More recently he has launched what is called the Wolfram physics project
1:18.6	Which is simply an effort to start with almost nothing and get the fundamental laws of physics out of them now
1:26.5	There's a lot to say about this
1:29.2	And we don't say everything in this podcast even though it's a long one
1:32.2	I you know I wanted to focus the podcast on
1:35.3	Giving a sketch for what the main ideas are of the Wolfram physics project and
1:41.2	How they are not yet fully developed but might be developed going down the line
1:45.9	There were a lot of criticisms and some
1:49.0	Kudos about how he developed it sort of outside the mainstream of physics research and so forth and then
1:56.3	You know laid on us hundreds of pages of work with he and his collaborators at the same time and you know
2:02.5	It's not the mainstream of theoretical physics most physicists who are doing their own thing did not drop everything to work on it
	...

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