The universe is made of discreet elements and relations between those elements, which we can think of as being kind of lines joining them. So there's some dots and there's some lines. They make a graph, or a hyperograph, i guess. There's a rule, there's a rule for up dating, to go from one collection of dots and lines to the next one, and then we just iterate that forever. And the whole universe comes out of that. It's very nice. That's the idea. I could have figured this out 25 years ago. In the end, it doesn't make much of a difference.
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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