Hi, I'm Lawrence Krause and welcome to the Origins Podcast.

This episode is with a fascinating individual, Stephen Wolfram, who's had many different careers.

Stephen began as a young scientist, a very young scientist,

self-educated, basically did without many degrees,

and went on to do a PhD at Caltech after educating himself,

and I think got it when he was 21, and was working with Richard Feynman.

Then he went on to continue to do physics and went to the Institute of Advanced Study, among other places,

but decided to branch out.

He's always been kind of an iconoclastic individual and decided that what the world needed

was a new way of doing mathematics on computers.

And he created what was one of the first symbolic manipulation

programs, something that allowed you to do not just number crunch with computers, but actually

do symbolic manipulation, do algebra. And Mathematica, the program he created in the company

he leads, became really the prime way that most scientists, most physicists at least now, do complex algebra.

They use mathematics, they do it, as well as much more.

But Stephen didn't rest on his laurels of just doing mathematics.

During that time, he's always been interested in doing research and falling up on ideas of something called cellular automata

to think about new ways of trying to understand fundamental physics.

And he's made great claims about what he, what his new way of doing science as he talks about

it might do for understanding physics, claims in fact that he can really reproduce all of

fundamental physics with his symbolic manipulation and these cellular automata ideas.

And I wanted to talk to him about that. And we did. We talked about that. We talked about his early

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