4min chapter

#637: Stephen Wolfram — Personal Productivity Systems, Richard Feynman Stories, Computational Thinking as a Superpower, Perceiving a Branching Universe, and The Ruliad... The Biggest Object in Metascience

The Tim Ferriss Show

notes

CHAPTER

Are You a Computer Physicist?

In another age, I would have been there with test tubes and other things doing physical experiments. But you do the experiments and there's a certain art to doing a good computer experiment. And they kind of inform your intuition and allow you to build things up. You're just turning over this rock in the computational world and suddenly discover that there's this whole crazy thing going on underneath it.

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Transcript

Episode notes

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Stephen Wolfram (@stephen_wolfram) is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; the originator of the Wolfram Physics Project; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of more than four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions, and innovations in science, technology, and business.

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[06:58] How Stephen collects information for his vast personal archives.

[08:40] When a situation warrants building a matrix.

[12:31] Science sometimes makes us look far back to move incrementally forward.

[17:49] Befriending the computational.

[22:59] How technology helps us navigate natural language.

[32:30] How Stephen chose subjects for his book Idea Makers.

[35:09] On spending time with Richard Feynman.

[37:33] Thoughts on Srinivasa Ramanujan.

[39:57] When Stephen started solving science problems with computers.

[42:00] Heresies today, gospels tomorrow.

[50:14] Ruminations on the ruliad.