Are we bound by the nature of some physical reality or can we really perceive almost anything we want? The role of science is to try and make this bridge between what the universe actually does and the narrative that we can carry in our minds. In ordinary physics, you throw a ball, those in a definite trajectory. Quantum physics, the big idea is, no, it doesn't just go in one definite trajectory. There are many different paths it follows, and those give you many possible breads of time, many possible histories for the universe. How much can we change what we perceive? Things that people have believed for a long time often have a lot more to them than one might imagine. Theoretical physicist, Dr. Stephen Wolfram, is the creator of the computational engine behind and the tools helping scientists model everything from AI to the fabric of the universe. This idea of a soul is this notion that there's something about what's happening in minds that isn't the physicality of brains. The fact that there is an objective reality for humans is a consequence of the fact that we're talking about humans. There are alien intelligences all over the place for us to be able to align the way we think with the way that alien mind thinks is big challenge. If you're going to think about aliens, if you're going to think about quantum mechanics, it's what is needed if you're going to think seriously about anything outside of the reality that you were dropped into. The universe will not be three-dimensional.

The alien mind might very well sense different laws of physics.

The universe could be one-dimensional, infinite-dimensional.

Are they close enough that we can communicate with them in some way?

You might make people believe in aliens right now.

What's really out there is something much bigger and more alien than one who'd imagined.

Hi, I'm Iron B. Alec. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today we're going to be talking about a little bit life the universe and everything. We have one of the most incredible pioneers in the field of computational mathematics, linguistics, technology. We have someone who literally created his own language that is used all over the world. And we get the fantastic opportunity to ask him really everything under the sun. Why are we here? How did we get here? How did we evolve? How do we understand the way that we evolved? How did his learning take him to the set of arrival where he was the science consultant on one of, I think, the greatest movies about alien communication that has been made. Steven Wolfram, he's the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha and the Wolfram language. He's the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. This is the kind of person you may have never heard about, but your life is touched by him in so many ways. One of the incredible things about Stephen is that he got his PhD in theoretical physics when he was 20 years old from Caltech. He graduated college at 17. He's an intellectual savant and also a really, really congenial, lovable, funny guy who entertains our questions about aliens, telepathy, sci-phenomenon. Can we understand the nature of reality as consciousness being a plane where we can dip and cut into time? He explains how evolution works. What's underneath time and space? When we move faster than the speed of light and one of the most important questions, how we have a terrible history and science of saying that things cannot happen. His open mindedness and curiosity and exploration are something to behold. If you've liked any of our episodes where philosophy and physics seem to blend together, where science and spirituality actually intersect, you're going to love this episode. Is consciousness fundamental? Is free will fundamental? We also asked Dr. Wolfram to weigh in on what medicine is getting wrong and how biology as a system is not able to be understood the way other systems are and what that means for pharmaceutical companies, for our health and for how we even approach healing. Please welcome to the breakdown, Dr. Steven Wilfrum. Break it down. Thank you. It's very exciting to have you here. You're one of these people that I think everyone should know about because so much of your work has been really foundational to what many of us take for granted. However, I'm going to be honest, a lot of people don't understand what exactly it is that you do. So we're going to let you start from there. Explain what your work does and what the most important thing is that you're working on now. Gosh, I've spent my life kind of alternating between doing technology and doing basic science. It's pretty cool because you do technology for a while, you build a bunch of tools that let you do more things in basic science, you do basic science for a while, gives you ideas that let you build more technology. I've iterated that about five times so far in my life. I've been building this kind of tower of things in technology and things in science that's pretty tall by now. And I feel like we can see a long way from that tower. So what can we see? I think the thing that's been really interesting is the foundations of a whole bunch of fields have turned out to be somewhat related in their kind of conceptual setup and places where we can make progress. So one big one is physics, trying to understand sort of what the universe is made of, what's underneath space and time and so on. That's one big area. Trying to understand kind of the foundations of mathematics turns out to be closely related in ways that I certainly didn't expect. A bunch of things recently about the foundations of biology and things like why does biologically-volution work and what actually is living matter? What kind of, you know, what strange thing is this arrangement of molecules that is a living system? And so there are a whole bunch of applications. And to still so turn out that a lot of questions that have been kind of long-time philosophical questions that seemed like they couldn't be addressed by science, we can start to talk about in scientific ways, things like, you know, what free will is and why it exists and what's going on with that. Even questions like, why does does the universe exist? These are questions that I had not expected we'd have anything to say about from science and turns out we do. Now in terms of sort of the kind of stack of ideas, kind of a lot of what I've done starts from one thing that I discovered back in the 1980s that was really surprising to me and I think it's sort of the thing that broke my previous intuition. Here's what it is. If you say, imagine that you set up some rules for how something operates. And it might be a little program that you write for a computer. You just tell the computers, keep running those rules, see what happens. You might think if you know the rules by which something operates, that that would kind of tell you what the thing is going to do. And at some level, if you follow the rules, you just run one step, the next step, the next step, you can see what happens after a billion steps or whatever else. The question is, can you kind of jump ahead? Can you with your mind and your mathematics or whatever else? Can you kind of be smarter than this little program and just say, I know what you're going to do in a billion steps. Here's

what it is. I can look at how you're set up, or the rule that you're set up with, and then I can

just jump ahead and say, this is what's going to happen in a billion steps. A lot of exact science

in the past is really based on the idea that yes, you can predict what's going to happen in systems. And the thing that I kind of discovered is that know that actually doesn't work. When you are kind of out in the computational universe of possible little rules, possible little programs, a large number of those kinds of programs have this thing that I call computational irreducibility, you kind of can't tell what's going happen, except by running each step and seeing what happens. So that's a thing that at one level is a limitation on what you can know in science, you can know the fundamental rules, but if you say, okay, I know the rules by which some little piece of a brain works, okay, so what is the whole brain going to do? The answer is there's a limitation to what you can say about that. So that was kind of, that was kind of an early discovery. Then their questions like, so one of the things that's really surprising from that is very simple rules can do very complicated things. So then you start asking, well, okay, you know, the biggest thing we know about is the universe. So could it be the case that the universe just operates according to some very simple rule? And everything we see, all the complexity that we see in the world, is just a consequence of kind of irreducibly running that rule. And so that's the thing I thought about for many, many years and about five years ago kind of made What was at first kind of a rather technical break through and then became a much bigger story and it's kind of the question of what is the universe actually made of and I think we have a pretty good Idea at this point and it's kind of exciting because a little progress was made in physics about a hundred years ago with relativity and quantum mechanics and so on and Things kind of got to a point where sort of rather incremental progress. Back when I was a kid I was involved in that incremental progress and I think contributed a bit to it. I happened to work on those things at a time when a lot was possible, just becoming possible. But now I think we're able to actually make some progress again. So the question starts off, we start off with, well, what's the universe made of? So, you know, we usually think that sort of there's space is the is a sort of fundamental thing in the universe and we have space, we have time and the question is, is space made of something? So it's been sort of a question about things in the universe ever since Antocate, which which is, is the universe made of discrete stuff, or is it made of continuous kinds of things?

Are there atoms that are sort of discrete elements that things are made of, or does everything

kind of flow like a fluid, like water or something like this?

People wondered about that for a long time.

It wasn't really resolved until the end of the 19th century that matter is made of discrete stuff matter is made of atoms and molecules and so on They became cute to think about light as being made of discrete photons and so on early part of the 20th century Most people believed that space would also turn out to be a discrete But people couldn't make that work sort of in the technical mathematics of what was going on then What we figured out a few years ago is yes, you can actually make that work and you can think of space and sort of everything in it as being this thing that is made of just these sort of atoms of space, these just points and then relations between points. So it's as if there's sort of a giant friend network of the atoms of space and that's kind of everything that exists in the universe. There's this giant kind of network of points that is the stuff that the universe is made of. And then you can ask, well, well, what does that thing do? What do you say? Well, every time there's a little piece of it that has a particular form, it will get transformed to a piece that has some other form, that sort of computational step applied many, many times is the thing that leads to the progress of time in the universe. Now that's, you know, the big deal is that you can go from the kind of more precise version of that description to say, okay, this is what the universe will seem like to an observer like us on a large scale, and the way it will seem turns out to follow what we know about the structure of space time and the way gravity works and things like this. So it's a very exciting to me, non-attributable thing that you can go from this very simple underlying description to kind of the things that we as, you know, rather large entities relative to the atoms of space perceive is going on. I mean, you know, it's the same kind of story. If you think about something like a glass of water or something, you might say it's a continuous thing. It just flows as water flows. But actually, we know at a microscopic scale, there's a bunch of molecules bouncing around in that water. It's just to us at the scale we're at, it seems like it's just this continuous thing. And it seems like that's the same story with space. We may or may not be lucky in the sense that in the beginning of the 20th century turned out molecules are big enough that with the equipment one had at the time one could tell they exist. To know that there are atoms of space, we may or may not be living in the right century to have the equipment that we need to be able to actually say, yes, we can absolutely tell that there are discrete atoms of space. So that's some, so that the kinds of things that these kind of this idea that you can have, sort of very simple rules that lead to very complicated behavior that corresponds to behavior that we kind of care about, like knowing how a universe works, for example. That's the kind of thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about. My ambiox break down is supported by optimizers. You know, I struggled to get good quality sleep and I just assumed it was stress. But as I learned, during paramanopause and menopause, your hormones shift in a way that affect your magnesium levels. And low magnesium, it makes everything harder, not just sleep, focus, mood, your tolerance for stress. That's why I have added magnesium breakthrough by by optimizers to my nightly routine. It's a blend of seven different forms of magnesium designed to support relaxation and overall sleep quality. Try it. See if you wake up more rested and refreshed. You've got nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Bi optimizers offers a 365 day. No questions asked. Money back guarantee. Magnesium breakthrough is a huge breakthrough to improve hormonal balance, to help with focus, decrease brain fog, improve sleep hygiene, overall, by optimizers makes it very easy. Jonathan, what do they get when they go to bioptimizers.com slash breaker and use the code breaker? You get 15% off your entire order in a free bottle of massimes. Bioptimizers best selling digestive enzyme. That'll be added to your order automatically when you use our exclusive code.

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Go to bioptimizers.com slash breaker. Use the code breaker, grab it before it's gone. Make 2026 the year you finally start sleeping again. This episode is sponsored by Wondering Jews and Open Door Media Brand. If you've ever found yourself feeling like you have more questions than answers, you're in good company. The Jewish people have been like that for thousands of years. Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast where two of today's most dynamic Jewish

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