The Beginning of the Universe, Okay?

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In these models, you might imagine the universe starts as a fairly small hypograph and gradually expands. This gets us into another, this is a deep rabbit hole that we're about to enter. So i think we shoulda postponed this to either inperson conversation or me pear on your podcast, because it does get kind of technical at some point. But i don't want to, a, not give you an opportunity to talk about the beginning of the universe. You talked about the end there but is there? I'm going to say that there is a principaled reason, within this approach, to start in what looks something like, very roughly, the big bank. Wel so the ion

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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