Is There a Single Thread of Time?

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It is not self evident that there is a notion of pure motion. In our models, you know, i take an object, i move it somewhere else,. It's made of different atoms of space by the time it gets to its destination. And so then the question is, how come there's an idea of pure motion? How come a thing can just be moved without changing. I thinkou you raised the anthropic principle. The only way that we can have life, intelligence, consciousness, whatever, is the particular way we've seen it. Even these very simple systems, such as liquid water, can do it. But if your argument for extra terrestrial intelligence tells you it's everywhere

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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