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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“Right, but, and you're not going to be able to see in that rule, oh, there's the three for the number of dimensions of space and so on. That's not going to be.”
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 the question is how do you actualize that? What might this rule be like? And so one thing you quickly realize is if you're going to pack everything about a universe into this tiny rule, not much that we are familiar with in our universe will be obvious in that rule. So, you don't get to fit all these parameters of the universe, all these features, this is how time works, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So the question is we're interested in finding a sort of simple computational rule that describes our whole universe.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aspect of the mountain. Yeah, right. I think that the meta idea about using simple computational systems to do things, that's the ultimate big paradigm that is sort of super important. The details of the particular model are very nice and clean and allow one to actually understand what's going on. They are not unique. And in fact, we know that. We know that there's a there's a large number of different ways to describe essentially the same thing. I mean, I can describe things in terms of hypergraphs. I can describe them in terms of higher category theory. I can describe them in a bunch of different ways. They are in some sense all the same thing, but our sort of story about what's going on and the kind of cultural mathematical resonances are a bit different. It's perhaps worth sort of saying a little bit about kind of the foundational ideas of”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Off into the stratosphere, ionosphere of mathematics turn out to be things which our sort of theory anchors down to something fairly definite and says are super relevant to the way that we can understand how physics works.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. I mean, it's a very interesting sort of history of science-like phenomenon. I mean, the best analogy that I can see is what happened with the early days of computability and computation theory. Turing machines were invented in 1936. People sort of understand computation in terms of Turing machines, but actually there had been pre-existing theories of computation, combinators, general cursive functions, lambda calculus, things like this. But people hadn't those hadn't been concrete enough that people could really wrap their arms around them and understand what was going on. And I think what we're going to see in this case is that a bunch of these mathematical theories, including some very, I mean, one of the things that's really interesting is one of the most abstract things that's come out of sort of mathematics, higher category theory, things about infinity group voids, things like this, which to me always just seemed like they were floating on.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just about able to understand the first 10 to the minus 100 seconds of the universe. And it will be 100 years before we get much further than that. It's just turned out it actually wasn't that hard. I mean, we're not finished.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To speak, that talk about various aspects of this machine code. And I think this is something that to me is very exciting because it allows one both for us to provide sort of a new foundation for what's been thought about there and for all the work that's been done in those areas to give us more momentum to be able to figure out what's going on. Now, people have sort of hoped, oh, we're just going to be able to get string theory to just answer everything. That hasn't worked out. And I think we now kind of can see a little bit about just sort of how far away certain kinds of things are from being able to explain things. Some things, one of the big surprises to me, actually literally just got a message about one aspect of this is turning out to be easier. I mean, this project has been so much easier than I could ever imagine it would be. That is, I thought we would be, you know,”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it's interesting. I mean, I would have said something very different before what's happened with our physics project. I mean, the remarkable thing is what we've been able to do is to make from this very simple, structurally simple underlying set of ideas, we've been able to build this very elaborate structure that's both very abstract and very sort of mathematically rich. And the big surprise, as far as I'm concerned, is that it touches many of the ideas that people have had. So in other words, things like string theory and so on, twister theory. It's like, we might have thought, I had thought, we're out on a prong. We're building something that's computational. It's completely different from what other people have done. But actually, it seems like what we've done is to provide essentially the machine code that these things are of various features of domain-specific languages.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The issue is you try to use the methods of quantum field theory to talk about gravity and it doesn't work. Just like there are photons of light, so there are gravitons which are sort of the particles of gravity. And when you try and compute the properties of the particles of gravity, the kind of mathematical tricks that get used in working things out in quantum field theory don't work. And so that's been a sort of fundamental issue.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there are things about it, it has certain, when we apply it, the standard model of particle physics, for example, which we apply to calculate all kinds of things, it works really well. And you say, well, it has certain parameters. It has a whole bunch of parameters, actually. You say, why does the muon particle exist? Why is it 206 times the mass of the electron? We don't know. No idea.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In quantum mechanics, the picture is definite things don't happen. Instead, sort of what happens is this whole sort of structure of all many different paths being followed. And we can calculate certain aspects of what happens, certain probabilities of different outcomes and so on. And you say, well, what really happened? What's really going on? What's the sort of story? How do we turn this mathematical theory that we can calculate things with into something that we can really understand and have a narrative about? And that's been really, really hard for quantum mechanics. My friend Dick Feynman always used to say, nobody understands quantum mechanics, even though he'd made his whole career out of calculating things about quantum mechanics.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a classical field. The quantum field is a much more mathematically elaborate kind of thing. And I should explain that one of the pictures of quantum mechanics that's really important is in classical physics, one believes that sort of definite things happen in the world. You pick up a ball, you throw it, the ball goes in a definite trajectory that has certain equations of motion, it goes in a parabola or whatever else.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are quantum fields. Those are different from classical fields. A field is something like you say the temperature field in this room. It's like there is a value of temperature at every point around the room. Or you can say the wind field would be the vector direction of the wind at every point.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the end, the kind of most quotes obvious mathematical structure of quantum field theory seems to work, although it's mathematically difficult to deal with. But you can calculate all kinds of things. You can calculate to a dozen decimal places, certain things. You can measure them. It all works. It's all beautiful.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of things like atoms worked great 1920s, 1930s, and so on. There was always a problem in quantum field theory, which is a theory of in quantum mechanics you're dealing with a certain number of electrons and you fix the number of electrons. You say, I'm dealing with a two-electron thing. In quantum field theory, you allow for particles being created and destroyed so you can emit a photon that didn't exist before. You can absorb a photon, things like that. That's a more complicated mathematically complicated theory, and it had all kinds of mathematical issues and all kinds of infinities that cropped up. And it was finally figured out more or less how to get rid of those. But there were only certain ways of doing the calculations, and those didn't work for atomic nuclei, among other things. And that led to a lot of development up until the 1960s of alternative ideas for how one could understand what was happening in atomic nuclei, etc., etc., etc. End result.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, right. Well, there's question. I mean, for example, is mass discrete as an interesting question, which is now something we can address. But what happened in the coming up to the 1920s, there was this kind of mathematical theory developed that could explain certain kinds of discreteness in particular in features of atoms and so on. And what developed was this mathematical theory that was the theory of quantum mechanics, theory of wave functions, Schr ⁇ dinger's equation, things like this. That's a mathematical theory that allows you to calculate lots of features of the microscopic world, lots of things about how atoms work, etc., etc. Now, the calculations all work just great. The question of what does it really mean is a complicated question. Now, I mean, to just explain a little bit historically, the early calculation”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quantum mechanics. Right. So quantum mechanics, the sort of the way that that originated was one question was, is the world continuous or is it discrete? You know, in ancient Greek times, people have been debating this. People debated it throughout history as light made of waves, as it continuous, is it discrete? Is it made of particles, corpuscles, whatever? What had become clear in the 1800s is that atoms that materials are made of discrete atoms. When you take some water, the water is not a continuous fluid, even though it seems like a continuous fluid to us at our scale. But if you say, let's look at it, it's more and smaller and smaller and smaller scale. Eventually you get down to these molecules and then atoms. It's made of discrete things. So the question is sort of how important is this discreteness just what's discrete, what's not discrete, is energy discrete is, you know, what's discrete.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, features of the expansion of the universe, yes. I mean, there are lots of details where we don't quite know how it's working. Where's the dark matter? Is there dark energy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? But fundamentally, the testable features of general relativity, it all works very beautifully. And it's in a sense, it is mathematically sophisticated, but it is not conceptually hard to understand in some sense.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. Like the university expanding, right? But it took until the 1940s, probably even really until the 1960s until people understood that black holes were a consequence of general relativity and so on. But that's the big surprise has been that so far this theory of gravity has perfectly agreed with these collisions of black holes seen by their gravitational waves. It all just works. So that's been kind of one pillar of the story of physics. It's mathematically complicated to work out the consequences of general relativity, but it's not, there's no, I mean, and some things are kind of squiggly and complicated. People believe, you know, energy is conserved.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happens there is just this curvature of space which causes the paths of objects to be deflected. That's what gravity does. It causes the paths of objects to be deflected. And this is an explanation for gravity, so to speak. And the surprise is that from 1915 until today, everything that we measured about gravity precisely agrees with general relativity. And that it wasn't clear black holes were sort of a predict, well, actually the expansion of the universe was an early potential prediction, although Einstein tried to sort of patch up his equations to make it not cause the universe to expand because it was kind of so obvious the universe wasn't expanding. And it turns out it was expanding and he should have just trusted the equations. And that's a lesson for those of us interested in making fundamental theories of physics is you should trust your theory and not try and patch it because of something that you think might be the case.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Structure of space is such that space is curved so the shorter distance between two points, the path, the straight line in quotes, won't be straight anymore. And in particular, if a photon is traveling near the sun or something, or if a particle is going, something is traveling near the sun, maybe the shortest path will be one that is something which looks curved to us because it seems curved to us because space has been deformed by the presence of mass associated with that massive object. So the kind of the idea there is think of the structure of space as being a dynamical changing kind of thing. But then what Einstein did was he wrote down these differential equations that basically represented the curvature of space and its response to the presence of mass and energy.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That special art of it. So then Einstein went on with sort of vaguely similar kinds of thinking. 1915 invented general relativity, which is the theory of gravity. And the basic point of general relativity is it's a theory that says when there is mass in space, space is curved. And what does that mean? Usually you think of what's the shortest distance between two points, like ordinarily on a plane in space, it's a straight line. Photons, light goes in straight lines. Well, then the question is, if you have a curved surface, a straight line is no longer straight on the surface of the earth, the shortest distance between two points is a great circle. It's a circle. So Einstein's observation was maybe the physical...”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basic idea was the speed of light appears to be constant, even if you're traveling very fast, you shine a flashlight, the light will come out, even if you're going at half the speed of light, the light doesn't come out of your flashlight at one and a half times the speed of light. It's still just the speed of light. And to make that work, you have to change your view of how space and time work to be able to account for the fact that when you're going faster, it appears that length is foreshortened and time is dilated and things like this.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The history is actually a little bit more complicated, but let's say there were two quantum mechanics and general relativity. Quantum mechanics, the kind of 1900 was kind of the very early stuff done by Planck that led to the idea of photons, particles of light. But let's take general relativity first. One feature of the story is that special relativity, thing Einstein invented in 1905, was something which surprisingly was a kind of logically invented theory. It was not a theory where it was something where given these ideas that were sort of axiomatically thought to be true about the world, it followed that such and such a thing would be the case. It was a little bit different from the kind of methodological structure of some existing theories in the more recent times, or it's just been we write down an equation and we find out that it works.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use mathematics to understand natural philosophy, to understand things about the way the world works. And so that then led to this kind of idea that we can write down a mathematical equation and have that represent how the world works. So Newton's one of his most famous ones is his universal law of gravity, inverse square law of gravity, that allowed him to compute all sorts of features of the planets and so on, although some of them he got wrong and it took another hundred years for people to actually be able to do the math to the level that was needed. But so that had been this sort of tradition was we write down these mathematical equations. We don't really know where these equations come from. We write them down, then we figure out, we work out their consequences, and we say, yes, that agrees with what we actually observe in astronomy or something like this. So that tradition continued. And then the first of these two sort of great 20th century innovations was, well,”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So, I mean, a little bit of history of physics, right? So, I mean, okay, very, very quick history, right? So, I mean, physics, you know, in ancient Greek times, people basically said, we can just figure out how the world works. We're philosophers, we're going to figure out how the world works. You know, some philosophers thought there were atoms, some philosophers thought there were continuous flows of things. People had different ideas about how the world works. And they tried to just say, we're going to construct this idea of how other world works. They didn't really have sort of notions of doing experiments and so on quite the same way as developed later. So that was sort of an early tradition for thinking about sort of models of the world. Then by the time of 1600s, time of Galileo and then Newton, sort of the big idea there was title of Newton's book, you know, Principia Mathematica, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I think what's surprising is we didn't know where those things came from. It's like general relativity. It's a very nice mathematically elegant theory. Why is it true? You know, quantum mechanics, why is it true? What we realized is that from this, that these theories are generic to a huge class of systems that have these particular very unstructured underlying rules. And that's the thing that is sort of remarkable, and that's the thing to me that's just, it's really beautiful. I mean, and the thing that's even more beautiful is that it turns out that people have been struggling for a long time. How does generativity theory of gravity relate to quantum mechanics? They seem to have all kinds of incompatibilities. It turns out what we realized is at some level they are the same theory.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These simple rules run into there are certain pieces of computational reducibility that quite generically occur for large classes of these rules. And this is the really exciting thing as far as I'm concerned, the big pieces of computational reducibility are basically the pillars of 20th century physics. That's the amazing thing that general relativity and quantum field theory, the sort of the pillars of 20th century physics turn out to be precisely the stuff you can say. There's a lot you can't say. There's a lot that's kind of at this irreducible level where you kind of don't know what's going to happen. You have to run it. You can't run it within our universe, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the thing is, there are things you can say. And the things you can say turn out to be very beautifully exactly the structure that was found in 20th century physics, namely”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so that's a really interesting question. So what I thought was going to happen is I thought we had a pretty good idea, had a pretty good idea for what the structure of this sort of theory that's sort of underneath space and time and so on might be like. And I thought, gosh, you know, in my lifetime, so to speak, we might be able to figure out what happens in the first 10 to the minus 100 seconds of the universe. That would be cool, but it's pretty far away from anything that we can see today and it will be hard to test whether that's right and so on and so on and so on. To my huge surprise, although it should have been obvious, and it's embarrassing that it wasn't obvious to me, but to my huge surprise, we managed to get unbelievably much further than that. And basically what happened is that it turns out that even though there's this kind of bed of computational irreducibility, that sort of these all...”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what it means to kind of have a fundamental theory of physics, as far as I'm concerned, is you've got this rule, it's potentially quite simple. We don't know for sure it's simple, but we have various reasons to believe it might be simple. And then you say, okay, I'm showing you this rule. You just run it, only 10 to the 500 times, and you'll get everything. In other words, you've kind of reduced the problem of physics to a problem of mathematics, so to speak. It's like it's as if you generate the digits of pi. There's a definite procedure. You just generate them. And it'd be the same thing if you have a fundamental theory of physics of the kind that I'm imagining, you get this rule and you just run it out and you get everything that happens 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
“Phenomenon in the universe. But because of computationally irreducibility, it's not, you know, that's not something where you say, okay, you've got the fundamental theory of everything, then tell me whether lions are going to eat tigers or something. No, you have to run this thing for 10 to the 500 steps or something to know something like that. So at some moment potentially, you say, this is a rule and run this rule enough times and you will get the whole universe.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, the question is can we kind of reduce what has been physics as something where we have to sort of pick away and say, do we roughly know how the world works to something where we have a complete formal theory, where we say, if we were to run this program for long enough, we would reproduce everything? Down to the fact that we're having this conversation at this moment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
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, this is what you kind of learn from this principle of computational equivalence. You learn it's both a message of sort of hope and a message of kind of you're not as special as you think you are, so to speak, because we imagine that with sort of all the things we do with human intelligence and all that kind of thing and all of the stuff we've constructed in science, it's like we're very special. But actually, it turns out, well, no, we're not. We're just doing computations like things in nature do computations like those gas molecules do computations like the weather does computations the only thing about the computations that we do that's really special is that we understand what they are so to speak in other words we have a you know to us they're special because kind of they're connected to our purposes our ways of thinking about things and so on and that's um but so so that's very”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, actually, I realized there's a thing I realized last week, actually, was a thing that people say, you know, one of the scenarios for the very long-term history of our universe is a so-called heat death of the universe, where basically everything just becomes thermodynamically boring. Everything's just this big kind of gas and thermal equilibrium. People say, that's a really bad outcome. But actually, it's not a really bad outcome. It's an outcome where there's all this computation going on and all those individual gas molecules are all bouncing around in very complicated ways doing this very elaborate computation. It just happens to be a computation that right now we haven't found ways to understand. We haven't found ways, you know, our brains haven't”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The air in here, it's this temperature, this pressure that's as much as we can say. Otherwise, just a bunch of random molecules bouncing around. People will say, I just can't believe they didn't realize that there was all this detail in how all these molecules were bouncing around, and they could make use of that.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that it's an interesting question, but I think that there is an infinite collection of these local pockets. We'll never run out of local pockets. And by the way, those local pockets are where we build engineering, for example. That's how we want to have a predictable life, so to speak, then we have to build in these sort of pockets of reducibility. Otherwise, if we were sort of existing in this kind of irreducible world, we'd never be able to have definite things to know what's going to happen. I have to say, I think one of the features, when we look at sort of today from the future, so to speak, I suspect one of the things where people will say, I can't believe they didn't see that is stuff to do with the following kind of thing. So, you know, if we describe, oh, I don't know, something like heat, for instance, we say, oh, you know,”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're kind of halfway. Halfway? Yeah, I think we're doing okay on that one. Different story. But the weather, you know, we're much closer on that.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, it turns out where the planets are is a piece of computational reducibility that 300 years ago or so we pretty much cracked. I mean, it's been technically difficult to get all the details right, but it's basically, we got that. Who's going to win or lose the battle? No, we didn't crack that one.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. So what has happened, you know, what science has become used to doing is using the little sort of pockets of computational reducibility, which, by the way, are an inevitable consequence of computational irreducibility, that there have to be these pockets scattered around of computational reducibility to be able to find those particular cases where you can jump ahead. I mean, one thing, sort of a little bit of a parable type thing that I think is fun to tell. If you look at ancient Babylon, they were trying to predict three kinds of things. They tried to predict where the planets would be, what the weather would be like, and who would win or lose a certain battle. And they had no idea which of these things would be more predictable than the other.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Says when one of these computations, one of these processes that follows rules doesn't seem like it's doing something obviously simple, then it has reached the sort of equivalent level of sophisticated computational sophistication of everything. So what does that mean? That means that you might say, gosh, I'm studying this little tiny program on my computer. I'm studying this little thing in nature. But I have my brain and my brain is surely much smarter than that thing. I'm going to be able to systematically outrun the computation that it does because I have a more sophisticated computation that I can do. But what the principle of computational equivalence says is that doesn't work. Our brains are doing computations that are exactly equivalent to the kinds of computations that are being done in all these other sorts of systems. And so what consequences does that have? Well, it means that we can't systematically outrun these systems. These systems are computationally”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So the question is if you think about things that happen as being computations, you think about some process in physics, something that you compute in mathematics, whatever else, it's a computation in the sense it has definite rules. You follow those rules, you follow them many steps, and you get some result. So then the issue is, if you look at all these different kinds of computations that can happen, whether they're computations that are happening in the natural world, whether they're happening in our brains, whether they're happening in our mathematics, whatever else, the big question is, how do these computations compare? Are there dumb computations and smart computations or are they somehow all equivalent? And the thing that I kind of was sort of surprised to realize from a bunch of experiments that I did in the early 90s, and now we have tons more evidence for it, this thing I call the principle of computational equivalence, which basically”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll see. This is a QA moment, as I say. We trust the product. Yes, we trust the product. And then you can be.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, well, let me just check what it thinks, see why it thinks that. It doesn't seem like my intuition. This is one of these cases where we can, the question is, do we trust the science or do we use common sense?”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hold on one second. I'm going to use my handy Wolfmalpha sunburn computation thing so long as I can get a network here. There we go. Oh, actually, you know what? It says sunburn unlikely. This is a QA moment.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It gives it meaning. Yes. I mean, it's what causes it to not be something where you can just say, you know, you went through all those steps to live your life, but we already knew what the answer was.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a sense, the fact that there is this computational irreducibility. It's like as we live our lives, so to speak, something is being achieved. We're computing what our lives, what happens in our lives.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the thing is, if you knew everything, it would be boring And it would be. And then, and worse than boring, so to speak. It would reveal the pointlessness, so to speak.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seems to be that way. Who's to know? But I think that people, my sort of vague impression is that people are sort of, oh, what's actually important? What is worth caring about and so on? And that seems to be something that perhaps is more emergent in this kind of situation.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm an optimist. No, I think that it'll be interesting to see, for example, with this pandemic. To me, when you look at organizations, for example, having some kind of perturbation, some kick to the system, usually the end result of that is actually quite good. Unless it kills the system, it's actually quite good usually. And I think in this case, people, I mean, my impression, it's a little weird for me because, you know, I've been a remote tech CEO for 30 years. This is bizarrely, you know, and the fact that, you know, like this coming to see you here is one of the rare moments coming in the fresh time in six months that I've been like in a building other than my house. So I'm a kind of ridiculous outlier in these kinds of things.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source