Is It Possible to Do a Quantum Field Theory?

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We are trying to see how do we get a representation that knits those two things together, where we are looking at locality in space and essentially cality in branchl space. If we can successfully do this, iam pretty sure we can do essentially numerical quantum field theory. It's either fimin diagrams or its latic gauge theory. And then, you know, the question f whether we see sort of perturbation theory. We're not ending up running into something where we say, oh, my gosh, that's, you know,. we just can't explain that. That's just a thing which just is totally orthognal to what our models are saying.

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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