Is There a Locality in Space?

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In the real world, there's at least two interesting places where we think locality breaks down. One is in quanta measurement, with bells in equality, right? And the other is potentially in quantum gravity,. So what is your feeling about how you can thread that needle of getting enough locality out of your rules, but also slight deviations from locality when you need them? O, my current guess is to say branchial space is differently laid out than physical space. But if we knew the maximum entanglement speed, we might be able to make this violation of bells and equality go away.

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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