YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen Wolfram

lines on the record

331

first

2020-09-15

most recent

2020-09-15

sittings or episodes

1

sources

podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “Because we're here, so to speak, and we're not, it's not like there's a thing where we're saying, you know, we are just but one sort of intelligence out of all these other intelligences. And so, you know, ultimately there'll be the superintelligence, which is all of these put together and it'll be very different from us. No, it's actually going to be equivalent to us. And the thing that makes us sort of special is just the details of us, so to speak. It's not something where we can say, oh, there's this other thing, you know, just you think humans are cool. Just wait until you've seen this. You know, it's going to be much more impressive. Well, no, it's all going to be kind of computationally equivalent. And the thing that, you know, it's not going to be, oh, this thing is amazingly much more impressive and amazingly much more meaningful, let's say. No.”

   2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Be happy with just humans. And it's kind of like, but we're making things. As it's not like we're just a tiny speck, we are in a sense we are more important by virtue of the fact that in a sense it's not like there is no ultimate because”

   2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Right. It's like turtles all the way down. And to me, it is a funny thing because every so often I get this, you know, as I'm thinking about, I think we've really gotten, you know, we've really figured out kind of the essence of how physics works. And I'm like thinking to myself, you know, here's this physical thing. And I'm like, you know, this feels like a very definite thing. How can it be the case that this is just some roule reference frame of this infinite creature that is so abstract and so on? And I kind of, it is a funny sort of feeling that we're sort of, it's like, in the end, it's just sort of...”

   2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Right, I mean, right. And, you know, it's funny for me because it's a pure sort of human being doing what I do. It's, you know, I'm, you know, like I'm interested in people. I like sort of, you know, the whole human experience, so to speak. And yet it's a little bit weird when I'm thinking, you know, it's all hypergraphs down there and it's all just hypergraphs.”

   2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Well, I think it just says that it's not a kind of question that there are things that it is reasonable. I mean, there's kinds of, you know, you can talk about hypercomputation as well. You can say, imagine there was a hypercomputer. Here's what it would do. It's okay, great. It would be lovely to have a hypercomputer, but unfortunately we can't make it in the universe. Like it would be lovely to answer this, but unfortunately we can't do it in the universe. And this is all we have, so to speak. And I think it's really just a statement. It's sort of, in the end, it'll be a kind of a logical inevitable statement, I think. I think it will be something where it is, as you understand what it means to have a sort of predicate of existence and what it means to have these kinds of things, it will sort of be inevitable that this has to be the case, that from within that universe, you can't establish the reason for its existence, so to speak. You can't prove that it.”

   2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “As an axiomatic theory like John arithmetic, you cannot from within that theory prove the consistency of the theory. So my guess is that for entities within the universe, there is no finite determination that can be made of the statement, the universe exists, is essentially undecidable to any entity that is embedded in the universe.”

   2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “By the way, I have to mention one more thing, which is the ultimate question from physics is, okay, so we have this abstract model of the universe. Why does the universe exist at all? So, you know, we might say there is a formal model that if you run this model, you get the universe, or the model gives you a model of the universe, right? You run this mathematical thing and the mathematics unfolds in the way that corresponds to the universe. But the question is, why was that actualized? Why does the actual universe actually exist? And so this is another one of these humility. And it's like, can you figure this out? I have a guess about the answer to that. And my guess is somewhat unsatisfying, but my guess is that it's a little bit similar to Girdle's second incompleteness theorem, which is the statement that from within...”

   2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Right, not when he first conceptualized universal computing for a very specific mathematical reason that wasn't as general. But yes, it's a good sort of exercise in humility to realize that it's kind of like it's really hard to figure these things out. The engineering of the universe, if we know how the universe works, how can we engineer it?”

   2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Right, well, so I'm trying to not have, if you think back to Alan Turing, for example, and, you know, when he invented Turing machines and imagining what computers would end up doing, so to speak. Very difficult. It's difficult, right? And this is... Made a few reasonable”

   2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Well, right, but also, and they used to think that this would just be random and interesting. But so this question about whether you can mess with the underlying structure and how you find a way to mess with the underlying structure, that's a, you know, I have to say, my immediate thing is, boy, that seems really hard. But then possibly computational irreducibility will bite you, but then there's always some path of computational reducibility. And that path of computational reducibility is the engineering invention that has to be made.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “I know. And I'm, you know, I have to say that this reminds me of people telling one years ago that you'll never transmit data over a copper wire at more than a thousand board or something. And this is why did that not happen? Why do we have these much, much faster data transmission? Because we've understood many more of the details of what's actually going on. And it's the same exact story here. And it's the same, you know, I think that this, as I say, I think one of the features of sort of one of the things about our time that will seem incredibly naive in the future is the belief that things like heat is just random motion of molecules, that it's just throw up your hands. It's just random. We can't say anything about it. That will seem naive.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “And that would lead to negative energy density, which would need to gravity is usually a purely attractive force, but negative mass would lead to repulsive gravity and lead to all kinds of weird things. Now, can it be done in our universe? My immediate thought is no, but the fact is that, okay, so”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Who knows whether they exist, and then the questions, another one okay, this is another crazy one is the thing that I'm calling a vacuum cleaner. So I mentioned that all this activity in the universe, which is maintaining the structure of space. And that leads to a certain energy density, effectively, in space. And so the question, in fact, dark energy is a story of essentially negative mass produced by the absence of energy you thought would be there, so to speak. And we don't know exactly how it works in either our model or the physical universe, but this notion of a vacuum cleaner is a thing where you have all these things that are maintaining the structure of space. But what if you could clean out some of that stuff that's maintaining the structure of space and make a simpler vacuum somewhere? You know, what would that do?”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Okay, I think it's far away, but I'm not certain. I mean, you know, this is the thing that I set myself an exercise. When gravity waves, gravitational waves were discovered, right? I set myself the exercise of what would black hole technology look like? In other words, right now, you know, black holes are far away. How on earth can we do things with them? But just imagine that we could get black holes right in our backyard. What kind of technology could we build with them? I got a certain distance, not that far. But I think so there are ideas. I have this one of the weirder ideas, the things I'm calling space tunnels, which are higher dimensional pieces of space-time, where basically you can, in our three-dimensional space, there might be a five-dimensional region, which actually will appear as a white hole at one end and a black hole at the other end.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “You know, I set myself some homework. I agreed to give a talk at some NASA workshop in a few weeks about faster than light travel. So I haven't figured it out yet.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Grounding for the idea that you could figure out something with math and science that was not what you Would intuitively think from your senses, so now we've got to this point where, for example, we say, you know, once we have the idea that computation is the foundational thing that explains our whole universe, then we have to say, well, what does it mean for other things? Like, it means there's computational irreducibility. That means science is limited in certain ways. That means this, that means that. But the fact that we have that grounding means that, you know, and I think, for example, for Copernicus, for instance, The implications of his work on the sort of mathematics of astronomy were cool, but they involved a very small number of people. The implications of his work for sort of the philosophy of how you think about things were vast and involved everybody more or less.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “About fascinating topic. But in any case, so computational irreducibility is one of these sort of concepts that I think is important in understanding lots of things in the world. But the question is, it's only important if you believe the world is fundamentally computational, right? But if you know the fundamental theory of physics and it's fundamentally computational, then you've rooted the whole thing. That is, you know the world is computational. And while you can discuss whether it's not the case that people say, well, you have this whole computational irreducibility, all these features of computation. We don't care about those because after all the world isn't computational, you might say. But if you know base, base, base thing, physics is computational, then you know that stuff is, you know, that's kind of the grounding for that stuff. In a sense, Copernicus was the”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “No, the point, I think, is the following, that right now I talk about computational irreducibility. People, I was very proud that I managed to get the term computational irreducibility into the congressional record last year. That's right.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “So it's like trust the mathematics, trust the science. Now fast forward 400 years. And now we're in this pandemic and it's kind of like everybody thinks the science will figure out everything. It's like from the science we can just figure out what to do. We can figure out everything. That was before Copernicus, nobody would have thought if the science says something that doesn't agree with our everyday experience where we just have to compute.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Here's my best guess. Okay, so if you look at the history of science, I think a very interesting analogy is Copernicus. Okay, so what did Copernicus do? There had been this Ptolemaic system for working out the motion of planets. It did pretty well. It used epicycles, etc., etc., etc. It had all this computational ways of working out where planets will be. When we work out where planets are today, we're basically using epicycles. But Copernicus had this different way of formulating things in which he said, you know, and the Earth is going around the sun. And that had a consequence. The consequence was you can use this mathematical theory to conclude something which is absolutely not what we can tell from common sense.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “And then it decays, and people just say, oh, it's too hard, but it's not relevant anyway. And I think that the thing that, you know, so the question of, you know, one question is, why does anybody, why should anybody care, right? Why should anybody care what the fundamental theory of physics is? I think it's intellectually interesting, but what will be the sort of impact of this?”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Yes, right, that's right. But I think the point is that it's like, you know, if you're doing biology, you might say, how can you not be really interested in the origin of life and the definition of life? Well, it's irrelevant. You're studying the properties of some virus. It doesn't matter where you're operating at some much higher level. And what's happened with physics is I was sort of surprised, actually. I was sort of mapping out this history of people's efforts to understand the fundamental theory of physics. And it's remarkable how little has been done on this question. And because there have been times when there's been bursts of enthusiasm, oh, we're almost there.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Oh, yes, absolutely. But the fundamental theory of physics is almost a footnote because it's the machine code. It's like we're operating in the high-level languages. That's what we really care about. That's what's relevant for our everyday physics.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “It's too hard Too hard, and people gave up. I mean, basically, what happened is ancient Greece, people thought we're nearly there. The world has made a platonic solids. It's water is a tetrahedron or something. We're almost there. Long period of time where people were like, no, we don't know how it works. Time of Newton, we're almost there. Everything is gravitation Time of Faraday and Maxwell, we're almost there. Everything is fields. Everything is the ether.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Of the model has this property just as things like general relativity, which corresponds to thing called general covariance, which is another gauge-like invariance. It could conceivably be the case that the kind of local gauge invariance that we see in particle physics is somehow generic. And that would be, you know, the thing that's really cool, I think, sociologically, although this hasn't really hit yet, is that all of these different things, all these different things people have been working on in these, in some cases quite abstruse areas of mathematical physics, an awful lot of them seem to tie into what we're doing. It might not be that way.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “The question is, you know, so there are a couple of things one might try to get in the world. So, for example, it's like, can we get three dimensions of space? We haven't managed to get that yet. Gauge theory, the standard model of particle physics says that it's SU3 cross SU2 cross U1. Those are the designations of these Lie groups. But anyway, so those are sort of representations of symmetries of the theory. It is conceivable that it is generically true. Okay, so all those are subgroups of a group called E8, which is a weird exceptional Lie group. It is conceivable. I don't know whether that's the case, that that will be generic in these models, that it will be generic, that the gauge invariance”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Well, I think in his particular case, I mean, from what I understand, which is not everything at all, but I think I know the rough tradition, at least, he's operating in is sort of gauge theories. Local Gauge invariants and so on. Okay, we are very close to understanding how local Gauge invariants works in our models, and it's very beautiful, and it's very, and does some of the mathematical structure that he's enthusiastic about fit? Quite possibly, yes.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “And, you know, it seems like it's kind of, you know, it's in that framework and it's kind of like I'm not sure how much further it's got than his PhD thesis, which was 20 years ago or something. And I think that it's a fairly specific piece of mathematical physics that's quite nice.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Another thing that's happened is the interest in computation around physics has been greatly enhanced by the whole quantum information, quantum computing story. The idea there might be something sort of computational related to physics has somehow grown. And I think it's sort of interesting. I mean, right now, if we say it's like who else is trying to come up with a fundamental theory of physics? It's like There aren't professional physics no professional physics, no professional physicists.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “The theoretical physics community pretty much uniformly uses wealth from language and mathematica, right? And so it's kind of like, you know, and that's, but the thing is what happens, this is what happens.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Right. But you see, what's happened, which is sort of interesting, is that a couple of things happened. And it was like, I don't want to do this project because I can do so many other things which I'm really interested in where, you know, people say, great, thanks for those tools. Thanks for those ideas, et cetera. Whereas, you know, if you're dealing with kind of a sort of a structure where people are saying, no, no, we don't want this new stuff. We don't need any new stuff. We're really fine with what we're doing.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Which was like, no, this can't possibly be right. And it's like, if what you're doing is right, it'll overturn 50 years of what we've been doing. And it's like, no, it won't, was what I was saying. And it's like, but, you know, for a while, when I started, I was going to go on back in 2002, well, 2004, actually, I was going to go on working on this project. And I actually stopped partly because it's like, why am I, you know, this is like, I've been in business a long time, right? I'm building a product for a target market that doesn't want the product. And it's like, wow.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “One of the things was interesting with that book was book comes out, lots of people think it's pretty interesting and lots of people start using what it has in different kinds of fields. The one field where there was sort of a heavy pitchforking was from my friends the fundamental physics people.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “It's a funny thing because a bunch of people have started working on this physics project, people who are physicists basically. And it is really a fascinating sociological phenomenon because when I was working on this before in the 1990s, wrote it up, put it, it's 100 pages of this 1,200-page book that I wrote New Kind of Science. It's 100 pages of that is about physics. I saw it at that time not as a pinnacle achievement, but rather as a use case, so to speak. I mean, my main point was this new kind of science, and it's like you can apply it to biology, you can apply it to, you know, other kinds of physics, you can apply it to fundamental physics. It's just an application, so to speak. It's not the core thing. But then...”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Something must be making there be order in the universe. We, in the sort of early theology point of view, that's the role of God is to do that, so to speak. In our, we might say it's the role of a formal theory to do that. And then the question is, but how simple should that theory be? And should that theory be one that I think the point is if it's simple, it's almost inevitably somewhat beautiful in the sense that because all the stuff that we see has to fit into this little tiny theory and the way it does that has to be, you know, it depends on your notion of beauty, but I mean, for me, the sort of the surprising connectivity of it is at least in my aesthetic, that's something that responds to my aesthetic.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “I think that before I worked on the project in recent times, I would have said, we do not know how complicated the rule for the universe will be. And I would have said, you know, the one thing we know, which is a fundamental fact about science, the thing that makes science possible, is that there is order in the universe. I mean, early theologians would have used that as an argument for the existence of God because it's like, why is there order in the universe? Why doesn't every single particle in the universe just do its own thing?”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “But I mean, the question is, you know, is beauty a guide to whether something is correct, which is kind of also the story of Occam's razor. You know, if you've got a bunch of different explanations of things, you know, is the thing that is the simplest explanation likely to be the correct explanation? And there are situations where that's true and there are situations where it isn't true. Sometimes in human systems, it is true because people have kind of, you know, in evolutionary systems, sometimes it's true because it's sort of been kicked to the point where it's minimized. But in physics, does Occam's razor work? Is there a simple, quotes, beautiful explanation for things, or is it a big mess? You know, we don't intrinsically know.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Okay, let me respond to what you were describing, which may or may not have anything to do with what Sabine Hossenfelder says or thinks.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Well, so what you're quoting, so I don't know that Sabine Hassenfelder's, you know, exactly what she said, but I mean, I'm quoting the”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “There is the realization that these are models of physics and therefore that you can use everything that's been developed in physics to get intuition about how things like that work. And that's why you can potentially use ideas from physics to get intuition about how to do parallel computing. And because the underlying model is the same. But we have all of this achievement in physics. I mean, you might say, oh, you've come up with a fundamental theory of physics that throws out what people own physics before. Well, it doesn't. But also the real power is to use what's been done before in physics to apply it in these other places.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “And once you have an incredibly minimal model, and this happened with cellular autometer as well, cellular autometer is an incredibly minimal model. And so it's inevitable that it gets you sort of an upstream thing that gets used in lots of different places. And it's like the fact that it gets used, you know, cellular automata is sort of a minimal model of, let's say, road traffic flow or something. And they're also a minimal model of something in chemistry. And they're also a minimal model of something in epidemiology. It's because they're such a simple model that they apply to all these different things. Similarly, this model that we have of the physics project is cellular autometer or a minimal model of parallel basically of parallel computation where you've defined space and time. These models are minimal models where you have not defined space and time. And they have been very hard to understand in the past. But I think perhaps the most important breakthrough”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Yeah, right. So the question is why is that happening? And the reason it's happening, I've thought about this, obviously, because I like to think about these meta-questions of what's happening is this model that we have is an incredibly minimal model.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Which is, which again we don't fully know, but it's a connection to something else you might not have thought was in the slightest bit connected, which is distributed blockchain-like things. You might figure out that you figure out that that's connected because it's the story of distributed computing. The issue, you know, with the blockchain, you're saying there's going to be this one ledger that globally says this is what happened in the world. But that's a bad deal if you've got all these different transactions that are happening and this transaction in country A doesn't have to be reconciled with the transaction in country B, at least not for a while. And that story. It's just like what happens when our causal graphs. That whole reconciliation thing is just like what happens with light cones and all this. Yeah, so that's what that's”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Well, it's just bizarre because we made these up a few years ago and they have these little triangle things and they are, we didn't quite get it right. We didn't quite get the analogy perfectly right, but it's very close. Just to say in terms of how these things are connected, so there's another bizarre connection that I have to mention because...”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what, right. So the finding of paths, the finding of shortest paths, or finding of paths at all is what automated theorem provers do. And actually what we've been doing, so we've actually been using automated theorem proving both in the physics project to prove things and using that as a way to understand multi-way graphs. what an automated theorem prover is doing is it's trying to find a path through a multi-way graph And it's critical par lemmas are precisely little stubs of branch pairs going off into branch hill space. And that's, I mean, it's really weird. You know, we have these visualizations in Wolfen language of proof graphs from our automated theorem proving system.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, what's really nice is that we are using this absolutely directly maps to theorem proving. So paths and multi-way graphs, that's what a theorem prover is trying to do.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Right. Right. So, for example, the understanding of metamathematical space, one of the reasons I really want to do that is because I want to understand quantum mechanics better. And that, what you see, you know, we live that kind of the multi-way graph of mathematics because we actually know this is a theorem we've heard of. This is another one we've heard of. We can actually say these are actual things in the world that we relate to, which we can't really do as readily for the physics case. And so it's kind of a way to help my intuition. It's also, you know, there are bizarre things like what's the analog of Einstein's equations in metamathematical space. What's the analog of a black hole? You know, it turns out it looks like, not completely sure yet, but there's this notion of non-constructive proofs in mathematics. And I think those relate to, well, actually, they relate to things related to event horizons. So the fact that you can take ideas from physics like event horizons.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “And one of the things that he constructed with this thing he called the infinity group void, and he has this sort of hypothesis about the inevitable appearance of geometry from essentially logic in the structure of this thing. Well, it turns out this Roulet multi-way system is the infinity group void. So it's this limiting object. And this is an instance of that limiting object. So what to me is, I mean, again, I've been always afraid of this kind of mathematics because it seemed incomprehensibly abstract to me. But what I'm sort of excited about with this is that we've sort of concretified the way that you can reach this kind of mathematics, which makes it, well, both seem more relevant and also the fact that I don't yet know exactly what mileage we're going to get from using the sort of the apparatus that's been built in those areas of mathematics.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Well, I'm not sure I have either. And maybe one of these things where in another five years or something, it's like, this was obvious, but I didn't see it. No, but the thing which is sort of interesting to me is that there's sort of an upper reach of mathematics, of the abstraction of mathematics, this thing, there's this mathematician called Grothendieck, who is generally viewed as being sort of one of the most abstract, sort of creator of the most abstract mathematics of 1970s-ish time frame.”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “And it turns out you can take the limits of infinite order category theory. So just give roughly the idea. This is a roughly explainable idea. So a mathematical proof will be a path that says you can get from this thing to this other thing. And here's the path that you get from this thing to this other thing. But in general, there may be many paths, many proofs that get you many different paths that all successfully go from this thing to this other thing. Now you can define a higher order proof. Which is a proof of the equivalence of those proofs. So you're saying”

    2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source