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

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“So this is the stack. So the first thing we want to understand is the quantization of spin. So particles, they kind of spin. They have a certain angular momentum. That angular momentum, even though the masses of particles are all over the place, the electron has a mass of 0.511 MAV, but the proton is 938 MeV, etc., etc., etc., they're all kind of random numbers. The spins of all these particles that are the integers or half integers. And that's a fact that was discovered in the 1920s, I guess. I think that we are close to understanding why spin is quantized. And that's, and it appears to be a quite elaborate mathematical story about homotopy groups in twister space and all kinds of things. But bottom line is that seems within reach. And that's a big deal because that's a very core feature of understanding.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. No, I mean, it's the thing that is, I keep on thinking it's going to be more difficult than it is. Now, that's a who knows what, I mean, the one thing, so the thing that's been was a big thing that I think we're pretty close to, I mean, I can give you a little bit of the roadmap, it's sort of interesting to see. It's like, what are particles? What are things like electrons? How do they really work?”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The low hanging. All right. Yeah, right. I mean, basically, here's the thing there's a certain list of, here are the effects in quantum mechanics, here are the effects in general relativity. It's just like industrial harvesting. It's like, can we get this one, this one, this one, this one, this one? And the thing that's really interesting and satisfying, and it's like, you know, is one claiming the right mountain? Does one have the right model? The thing that's just amazing is, you know, we keep on like, are we going to get this one? How hard is this one? It's like, oh, you know, it looks really hard. It looks really hard. Oh, actually, we can get it.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, people will do amazing things with, and that's the part, but it isn't like you have to have done 10 years of study to get to the point where you can do the experiments. That's a cool thing. You can do experiments.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, right. And you can get sort of core intuition for what's going on. Now, in terms of contributing to this, I would say that the study of the computational universe and how all these programs work in the computational universe, there's just an unbelievable amount to do there. And it is very close to the surface. That is, you know, high school kids, you can do experiments. It's not, you know, and you can discover things. I mean, you can discover stuff about, I don't know, like this thing about expansion of Branchill space. That's an absolutely accessible thing to look at. Now, you know, the main issue with doing these things is not there isn't a lot of technical depth difficulty there. The actual doing of the experiments, you know, all the code is all on our website to do all these things. The real thing is sort of the judgment of what's the right experiment to do, how do you interpret what you see. That's the part that...”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, oh, do we get the limit right? Did this, you know, did this thing that is of zero, you know, measure zero object interact with this thing in the right way? You don't have to have that whole discussion. It's just like, here's a picture. This is what it does. And then it takes more effort to say, what does it do in the limit when the picture gets very big? But you can do experiments.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it does not. And in fact, a lot of what has happened with this project makes a lot of this stuff much more accessible. There are things where it has been quite difficult to explain what's going on and it requires much more having the concreteness of being able to do simulations, knowing that this thing that you might have thought was just an analogy is really actually what's going on makes one feel much more secure about just sort of saying this is how this works. And I think it will be, I'm hoping the textbooks of the future, the physics textbooks of the future, there will be a certain compression. There will be things that used to be very much more elaborate. Because, for example, even doing continuous mathematics versus this discrete mathematics, to know how things work. In continuous mathematics, you have to be talking about stuff and waving your hands about things. Whereas with discrete version, it's just like, here is a picture. This is how it works.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then it's quite accessible to, I mean, I wrote this sort of long technical introduction to the project, which seems to have been very accessible to people who understand computation and formal abstract ideas, but are not specialists in physics or other kinds of things. I mean, the thing with the physics part of it is, you know, There's both a way of thinking and a literally a mathematical formalism. I mean, it's like, you know, to know that we get the Einstein equations, to know we get the energy momentum tensor, you kind of have to know what the energy momentum tensor is. And that's physics. I mean, that's kind of graduate level physics, basically. And so that making that final connection requires some depth of physics knowledge.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I think that those are different questions. So, I mean, I think that why does this work? Why does this make any sense to really know that you have to know a fair amount of physics? And for example, have a decent”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It goes through quantum mechanics. It does. But we know a little bit more since that blog post that probably clarifies, but that blog post does a pretty decent job. And, you know, talking about things like, again, something you didn't mention, the fact that the uncertainty principle is a consequence of curvature in Branchill space.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but so, I mean, you know, I wrote this kind of original announcement, blog post about this project, which people seem to have found, I've been really happy actually that people who seem to have grocked key points from that much deeper key points. People seem to have grocked than I thought they would grok.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physicist. Well, I would say a mathematical physicist. He's pretty mathematically sophisticated. He regularly out mathematicizes me.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, I mean, I think that I've written a bunch of stuff, Buzz and Call Jonathan Gorod, who's been a key person working on this project, has also written a bunch of stuff. And some other people have started writing things too.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into one dimension with a space filling curve, and it's like, why is it this space filling curve and not another space filling curve? And that becomes a story about Riemann surfaces and things. And it's quite elaborate. But there's a little bit sleight of hand way of doing it where it's surprisingly direct.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the basic point is just this fact that there are all these different branches. That there's this kind of map of how the branches work. And that, I mean, I think actually the recent things that we have about the double slut experiment are pretty good because you can actually see how the double slit phenomenon arises from just features of these graphs. Now, having said that, there is a little bit of sleight of hand there because the true story of the way that double slit thing works depends on a coordinization of Branchill space that, for example, in our internal team, there is still a vigorous battle going on about how that works. And it's what's becoming clear is, I mean, what's becoming clear is that it's mathematically really quite interesting. I mean, that is that there's a, you know, it involves essentially putting space filling curves. You basically have a thing which is naturally two-dimensional and you're sort of mapping it.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, special relativity, I think, is a little bit elaborate to explain. And honestly, you only care about it if you know about special relativity. If you know how special relativity is ordinarily derived and so on. General.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Structure of that space, the curvature of that space as gravity, that can be explained without going anywhere near quantum mechanics. I would say that's actually easier to explain than special relativity.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I think is a pretty good. When I've tried to explain this to people, and it's a pretty good place to start is you've got this rule, you know, you apply the rule, you're building up this big hypergraph, you've got all these possibilities, you're kind of thinking about that in terms of quantum mechanics. I mean, that's a decent place to start.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, it was a really practical matter. We have this kind of visual summary picture that we made.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I think that the look, I think the real answer is going to be that for practical purposes, the official brand that says you can do exponential things in polynomial time is probably not going to work.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quantum computing for free, so to speak, just from the expansion of the universe in Branchhield space. Now, the physical space version is kind of absurd and involves springs between black holes and so on It's conceivable that the Branch School”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, for example, if you imagine you've got two galaxies, they're receding from each other very quickly. They've got two big central black holes. You connect a spring between these two central black holes. Not easy to do in practice, but let's imagine you could do it. Now, that spring is being pulled apart. It's getting more potential energy in the spring as a result of the expansion of the universe. So in a sense, you are piggybacking on the expansion that exists in the universe and the sort of violation of energy conservation that's associated with that cosmological expansion to essentially get energy. You're essentially building a perpetual motion machine by using the expansion of the universe. And that is a physical version of that. It is conceivable that the same thing can be done in Branchield space to essentially mine the expansion of the universe in branchial space as a way to get sort of”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine you think about energy in the context of cosmology, in the context of the whole universe. It's a much more complicated story. The expansion of the universe kind of violates energy conservation.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we're being trying to do, yes, we're getting that. We haven't done that yet. I mean, there's a pretty good indication of how that's going to work out, and we've done it, as I say, our computer experiments, we've unimpressively gotten to about two times three in terms of factorization, which is kind of about how far people have got with physical quantum computers as well. But yes, we will be able to, we definitely will be able to do complexity analysis, and we will be able to know. So the one remaining hope for quantum computing really, really working at this formal level of quantum brand exponential stuff being done in polynomial time and so on, the one hope, which is very bizarre, is that you can kind of piggyback on the expansion of Branchhield space. So here's how that might work. So you think energy conservation, standard thing in high school physics, energy is conserved, right? But now you imagine...”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right, but the point is that what we're saying is the thing we've got this representation of, let's say, Shaw's algorithm in terms of standard quantum gates. And it's just a pure matter of sort of computation to just say that is equivalent. We will get the same result as running this multi-way system.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You lose all By the way, I mean, so again, this question do we actually know what we're talking about about quantum computing and so on. So again, we're doing proof by compilation. So we have a quantum computing framework. And Wolfram Language, which is a standard quantum computing framework that represents things in terms of the standard formalism of quantum mechanics. And we have a compiler that simply compiles the representation of quantum gates into multi-way systems. And in fact, the message that I got was from somebody who's working on the project who has managed to compile one of the sort of core formalism based on category theory systems. Can you say more?”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm suspecting the answer is no, but that's not relevant to the practical speed ups you can get by using different kinds of technologies, different kinds of physics to do basic computing.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is kind of in this factorization in quantum computers, but we can what seems to be the case is that the advantage you get from the parallelization from quantum mechanics is lost from the amount that you have to spend pulling together all those parallel threads to get to a classical answer at the end. Now, that phenomenon is not unrelated to various decoherence phenomena that are seen in practical quantum computers and so on. I mean, I should say, as a very practical point, I mean, it's like, should people stop bothering to do quantum computing research? No, because what they're really doing is they're trying to use physics to get to a new level of what's possible in computing. And that's a completely valid activity, whether you can really put, whether you can say, oh, you can solve an MP complete problem, you can reduce exponential time to polynomial time, you know, we're not sure.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's this algorithm Shaw's algorithm, which allows you, according to the formalism of quantum mechanics, to do everything in parallel and to do it much faster than you can on a classical computer. Okay. The only little footnote is you have to figure out what the answer is. You have to measure the result. So the quantum mechanics internally has figured out all these different branches, but then you have to pull all these branches together to say, and the classical answer is this. The standard theory of quantum mechanics does not tell you how to do that. It tells you how the branching works, but doesn't tell you the process of corralling all these things together. And that process, which intuitively you can see, is going to be kind of tricky, but our model actually does tell you how that process of pulling things together works. And the answer seems to be, we're not absolutely sure we've only got to two times three so far.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In ordinary computing, it seems like we pretty much just have to try all these different factors, you know, kind of one after another. But in quantum mechanics, you might have the idea, oh, you can just sort of have the physics, try all of them in parallel.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we tried to work the big thing we tried to do was invent a randomness chip that would generate randomness at a high speed using quantum mechanics. And the discovery that that wasn't really possible was part of the story of, it never really wrote anything about it. I think maybe he wrote some stuff, but we didn't write stuff about what we figured out about sort of the fact that it really seemed like the measurement process in quantum mechanics was a serious damper on what was possible to do in sort of the possible advantages of quantum mechanics for computing. But anyway, so the sort of the promise of quantum computing is let's say you're trying to factor an integer. Well, you can, instead of when you factor an integer, you might say, well, does this factor work? Does this factor work? Does this factor work?”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so the basic idea of quantum computers, the promise of quantum computers is quantum mechanics does things in parallel. And so you can sort of intrinsically do computations in parallel, and somehow that can be much more efficient than just doing them one after another. And I actually worked on quantum computing a bit with Dick Feynman back in 1981, two, three, that kind of timeframe.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And there are indications, and we can do computer experiments, and we can see how it's going to come out, but we need to, you know, the actual mathematics doesn't exist. And in Branch Hill space, it's actually even worse. There's even more sort of layers of mathematics that we can see how it works roughly by doing computer experiments, but to really understand it, we need more sort of mathematical sophistication.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mathematically speaking, yes, it's a very beautiful mathematical thing, and it's very, I mean, by the way, this whole theory is just amazingly rich in terms of the mathematics that it says should exist. Okay, so for example, calculus is the story of infinitesimal change in interdimensional space, one-dimensional, two-dimensional, three-dimensional space. We need a theory of infinitesimal change in fractional dimensional and dynamic dimensional space. No such theory exists.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One slit. And in what happens in this model, and we've just been understanding this in the last few weeks, actually, is that the What essentially happens is that the double slit experiment is a story of the interface between Branchial space and physical space. And what's essentially happening is that the destructive interference is the result of the two possible paths associated with photons going through those two slits winding up at opposite ends of branchial space. And so that's why there's sort of nothing there when you look at it is because these two different sort of branches couldn't get merged together to produce something that you can measure in physical space.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I mean, to me, you know, look, having spent some part of my early life working in the context of these theories of 20th century physics, they seem so different. And the fact that they're really the same is just really amazing. Actually, you mentioned double slut experiment, okay? So the double slut experiment is an interference phenomenon where you say there are, you know, you can have a photon or an electron and you say there are these two slits that could have gone through either one, but there is this interference pattern where there's destructive interference, where you might have said in classical physics, oh, well, if there are two slits, then there's a better chance that it gets through one or the other of them. But in quantum mechanics, there's this phenomenon of destructive interference that means that even though there are two slits, two can lead to nothing as opposed to two leading to more than, for example,”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Space and the physical space, but the underlying equation is the same. So, in other words, it's just these two theories, which are the two sort of pillars of 20th century physics, which have seemed to be off in different directions, are actually facets of the exact same theory.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so this is a deflection of a path in Branch Hill space that is described by this path integral, which is the thing that is the mathematical essence of quantum mechanics. Turns out that deflection is the deflection of GD6 and Branchhill space follows the exact same mathematical setup as the deflection of GD6 and physical space, except the deflection of GD6 and physical space is described with Einstein's equations, the deflection of GD6 and Branchial space is defined by the Feiman-Path integral, and they are the same. In other words, they are mathematically the same. So that means that general relativity is a story of essentially motion in physical space. Quantum mechanics is a story of essentially motion in Branchial space, and the underlying equation for those two things, although it's presented differently because one's interested in different things and”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so let me explain why. So let's talk about, okay, so first of all, just to finish the thought about quantum amplitudes, the incredibly beautiful thing. This is just, I'm just very excited about this. The Feynman path integral is this formula that says that the amplitude, the quantum amplitude is e to the i s over h bar, where s is this thing called the action. And okay, so that can be thought of as representing a deflection of the angle of this path in the multi-way graph. So it's a deflection of a jodesic in the multi-way path that is caused by this thing called the action, which is essentially associated with energy.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know that space is probably exponential dimensional, which makes it again another can of worms in understanding what's going on. That space has, in ordinary space, this hypergraph, the spatial hypergraph, limits to something which is like a manifold, like something like three-dimensional space, almost certainly the multi-way graph limits to a Hilbert space, which is something that I mean it's just a weirder exponential dimensional space. And by the way, you can ask, I mean, there are much weirder things that go on. For example, one of the things I've been interested in is the expansion of the universe in Branch Hill space. So we know the universe is expanding in physical space, but the universe is probably also expanding. So that means the number of quantum states of the universe is increasing with time.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just you have this hypergraph. Sorry, you have this multiway graph. It's this big branching thing, branching and merging thing. But I mean, like moving.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, what's happening is does this quantum state evolve through this other quantum state? It's like saying, does this object move from this place in space to this other place in space? Now, the way that these quantum amplitudes characterize kind of to what extent the thing will successfully reach some particular point in Branchial space, just like in physical space, you could say, oh, it had a certain velocity and it went in this direction. In Branchill space, there's a similar kind of concept.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The magnitude comes okay, so how do you compute things in quantum mechanics? I'm telling you, I'm getting there to be able to do this at a middle school level, but I'm not there yet. Roughly what happens is you're asking, does this state in quantum mechanics evolve to this other state in quantum mechanics? And you can think about that like a particle traveling or something traveling through physical space, but instead it's traveling through branchial space.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The presence of energy according to Einstein's equations. So it turns out that rather amazingly the same thing is true in Branchhill space. So it turns out the presence of energy, or more accurately Lagrangian density, which is a kind of relativistic invariant version of energy, the presence of that causes essentially deflection of GD6 in this Branchial space. So you might say, so what? Well, turns out that the best formulation we have of quantum mechanics, this Feynman path integral, is a thing that describes quantum processes in terms of mathematics that can be interpreted as, well, in quantum mechanics, the big thing is you get these quantum amplitudes, which are complex numbers that represent, when you combine them together, represent probabilities of things happening. And so the big story”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm getting closer. It's getting there. I'm not quite there. I've tried it a few times, and I realize that there are things where I have to start talking about elaborate mathematical concepts and so on. But I think, and you've got to realize it's not self-evident that we can explain at an intuitively graspable level something which about the way the universe works. The universe wasn't built for our understanding, so to speak. But I think then, okay, so another important idea is this idea of Branchhill space, which I mentioned, this sort of space of quantum states, it is, okay, so I mentioned Einstein's equations describing the effect of mass and energy on trajectories of particles, on geod6, the curvature of physical space is associated with”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's amazing how much these things are unraveling. I mean, you know, these things look, it used to be the case that I would agree with Dick Feynman. Nobody understands quantum mechanics, including me. I'm getting to the point where I think I actually understand quantum mechanics. My exercise, okay, is can I explain quantum mechanics for real at the level of kind of middle school type explanation?”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In thermodynamics, the fact that we believe entropy increases, we believe things get more disordered is a consequence of the fact that we can't track each individual molecule. If we could track every single molecule, we could run every movie and reverse, so to speak, and we would not see that things are getting more disordered. But it's because we are computationally bounded, we can only look at these big blobs of what all these molecules collectively do that we think that things are, that we describe it in terms of entropy increasing and so on. And it's the same phenomenon basically. Also, consequence of computational irreducibility that causes us to basically be forced to conclude that definite things happen in the world, even though there's this quantum, you know, this set of all these different quantum processes that are going on. So, I mean, I'm skipping a little bit and that's a rough picture.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deciding how you slice up this multiway system in these quantum observation frames. So in a sense, the observer, the way the observer enters is by their choice of these quantum observation frames. And what happens is that the observer, because this is again another stack of other concepts, but anyway, because the observer is computationally bounded, there is a limit to the type of quantum observation frames that they can construct.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still here? Are we traveling at half the speed of light and making measurements that way? These are different reference frames in which we're making our measurements. And the relationship between different events and different points in space and time will be different depending on what reference frame we're in. So then we have this idea of quantum observation frames, which are the analog of reference frames but in Branchill space. And so what happens is what we realize is that a quantum measurement is the observer is sort of arbitrarily determining this reference frame. The observer is saying I'm going to understand the world by saying that space and time are coordinateized this way. I'm going to understand the world by saying that quantum states and time are coordinateized in this way. And essentially what happens is that the process of quantum measurement is a process of”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take, let's say, the causal graph, and we can slice that at a particular time, and then we get this map of how things are laid out in physical space. When we do the same kind of thing, there's a thing called the multi-way causal graph, which is the analog of a causal graph for the multi-way system. We slice that. We get essentially the relationships between things, not in physical space, but in the space of quantum states. It's like which quantum state is similar to which other quantum state. Okay, so now I think next thing to say is just to mention how quantum measurement works. So quantum measurement has to do with reference frames in Branchield space. So, okay, so measurement in physical space, it matters whether how we assign spatial position and how we define coordinates in space and time. And that's how we make measurements in ordinary space. Are we making a measurement based on our sitting?”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source