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 that's a good thing. The bad thing is it doesn't allow you to jump through time and know what the answer is. This is scary.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get society through the issue, even though the idea that we're just going to sort of be able to get the definitive answer from science and it's going to tell us exactly what to do, unfortunately it's interesting because let me point out that if that was possible, if science could always tell us what to do, then in a sense our, you know, that would be a big downer for our lives if science could always tell us what the answer is going to be. It's like, well, you know, it's kind of fun to live one's life and just sort of see what happens. If one could always just say, let me check my science. Oh, I know the result of everything is going to be 42. I don't need to live my life and do what I do. It's just, we already know the answer. It's actually good news in a sense that there is this phenomenon of computational irreducibility that doesn't allow you to just sort of jump through time and say this is the answer, 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
“Well, I think this is a place where politicians and political leaders do for a living, so to speak, is you've got to make some decision about what to do.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my guess is the specific risk of viral pandemics, that the pure virology and immunology of the thing, this will cause that to advance to the point where this particular risk is probably considerably mitigated. But is the structure of modern society robust to all kinds of risks? Well, the answer is clearly no. And it's surprising to me the extent to which people, you know, as I say, it's kind of scary actually how much people believe in science. That is, people say, oh, because the science says this, that, and the other, we'll do this and this and this, even though from a sort of common sense point of view, it's a little bit crazy. And people are not prepared and it doesn't really work in society as it is for people to say, well, actually, we don't really know how the science works. People say, well, tell us what to do.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The good news is the curves basically, you know, for reasons we don't understand, the curves, you know, the clearly measurable mortality curves and so on for the northern hemisphere have gone down.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of mining. Now, you know, actually, I've understood in recent years that the story of thermodynamics is actually precisely a story of computational irreducibility, but it is already an analogy. You can kind of see that. Can you take what you're asking to do there is you're asking to go from the kind of the mess of all these complicated human interactions and all this kind of computational processes going on. And you say, I want to achieve this particular thing out of it. I want to kind of extract from the heat of what's happening. I want to kind of extract this useful piece of sort of mechanical work that I find helpful.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underlying rule of See, this is an interesting thing. So, I mean, this is the question of what you're describing as kind of the problem of many situations where you would like to get away from computational irreducibility, a classic one in physics is thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics, the law that says entropy tends to increase things that start orderly, tend to get more disordered, or which is also the thing that says given that you have a bunch of heat, it's hard heat is, you know, the microscopic motion of molecules, it's hard to turn that heat into systematic mechanical work. It's hard to just take something being hot and turn that into, oh, all the atoms are going to line up in the bar of metal and the piece of metal is going to shoot in some direction. That's essentially the same problem as how do you go from this computationally irreducible mess of things happening and get something you want out of it.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so you know on this graph of how humans are connected, you know something about what happens if this happens and that happens, that graph is made in complicated ways that depends on all sorts of issues where we don't have the data about how human society works well enough to be able to make that graph. There's actually one of my kids did a study of sort of what happens on different kinds of graphs and how robust are the results. His basic answer is there are a few general results that you can get that are quite robust like a small number of big gatherings is worth than a large number of small gatherings okay that's quite robust but when you ask more detailed questions it seemed like it just depends it depends on details in other words it's kind of telling you in that case you know the irreducibility matters so to speak it's not there's not going to be this kind of one sort of master theorem that says and therefore”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I mean, I think actually it's a funny thing because it turns out the main model, you know, the SIR model, I only realized recently was invented by the grandfather of a good friend of mine from high school. So that was just a, you know, it's a weird thing, right? The question is.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's another funny thing as we were getting ready to release this physics project. We realized that a bunch of things we'd worked out about foliations of causal graphs and things were directly relevant to thinking about contact tracing. Yeah, exactly and interactions of cell phones and so on, which is really weird.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's going to happen? But I mean, it's similar to sort of explaining things in AI or in any computational system. It's like explain what happened. Well, it could just be this happened because of this detail and this detail and this detail and a million details. And there isn't a big story to tell. There's no kind of big arc of the story that says, oh, it's because there's a viral field that has these properties and people start showing symptoms when the seasons change, people will show symptoms. And people don't even understand seasonal variation of flu, for example. It's something where there could be a big story or it could be just a zillion little details that mount up.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than you are. That is, you know, you look at one of these things, and it's like it can't possibly do such and such a thing. Then you run it and it's like, wait a minute, it's doing that thing. How does that work? Okay, now I can go back and understand it.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of a sign of reducibility. But when you just say, let's from first principles figure out what's going on, then you can potentially be stuck in this kind of mess of irreducibility where you just have to simulate each step and you can't do that unless you know details about human interaction networks and so on and so on and so on. The thing that has been very sort of frustrating to see is the mismatch between people's expectations about what science can deliver and what science can actually deliver so to speak. Because people have this idea that it's science. So there must be a definite answer and we must be able to know that answer. And it is both when you've, after you've played around with sort of little programs in the computational universe, you don't have that intuition anymore. I'm always fond of saying the computational animals are always smart.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit bizarre. But I thought I should do the public service thing of trying to understand what I could about the pandemic. And we've been curating data about it and all that kind of thing. But, you know, so I started looking at the data and started looking at modeling. And I decided it's just really hard. You need to know a lot of stuff that we don't know about human interactions. It's actually clear now that there's a lot of stuff we didn't know about viruses and about the way immunity works and so on. And it's, you know, I think what will come out in the end is there's a certain amount of what happens that we just kind of have to trace each step and see what happens. There's a certain amount of stuff where there's going to be a big narrative about this happened because of T cell immunity. This happened because there's this whole giant sort of field of asymptomatic viral stuff out there. There will be a narrative and that narrative, whenever there's a narrative, that's”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's a complicated thing. So, I mean, when this pandemic started up, I happened to be in the middle of being about to release this whole physics project thing. But I thought timing.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most likely it will be irreducible. And what we're throwing in the world, so to speak, when we engineer things, we tend to engineer things to sort of keep in the zone of reducibility. When we're throwing things by the natural world, for example, not at all certain that we will be kept in this kind of zone of reducibility.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“then you can go down this chain of sort of reducible, answerable things. But if you just say, I'm just pick a question at random, I'm going to have my computer pick a question at random.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. But it's a question of how big are they? What will they allow you to say? And so on. And figuring out where those pockets are, I mean, in a sense, that's sort of an essential thing that one would like to do in science. But the important thing to realize that has not been is that science, if you just pick an arbitrary thing and you say, what's the answer to this question? That question may not be one that has a computationally reducible answer. That question, if you choose, if you walk along the series of questions and you've got one that's reducible and you get to another one that's nearby and it's reducible too, if you stick to that kind of land, 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
“Case of that is science has chosen to talk a lot about places where there is this computational reducibility that it can find the motion of the planets can be more or less predicted, something about the weather is much harder to predict, something about other kinds of things that are much harder to predict. And these are, but science has tended to concentrate itself on places where its methods have allowed successful prediction.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's where we live in the pockets of reducibility. That's why, you know, and this is one of the things that have come out of this physics project, and actually something that, again, I should have realized many years ago, but didn't, is, you know, it could very well be that everything about the world is computationally irreducible and completely unpredictable. But in our experience of the world, there is at least some amount of prediction we can make. And that's because we have sort of chosen a slice of, probably talk about this in much more detail, but I mean, we've kind of chosen a slice of how to think about the universe in which we can kind of sample a certain amount of computational reducibility. And that's sort of where we exist. And it may not be the whole story of how the universe is, but it is the part of the universe that we care about and we sort of operate in. And that's in science, that's been sort of a very special.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, we don't have the tools yet. No, that's the whole point. I mean, that's sort of the big discovery of this principle of computational equivalence of mine. And this is something which is kind of a follow-on to Girdel's theorem, to Turing's work on the halting problem, all these kinds of things, that there is this fundamental limitation built into science, this idea of computational irreducibility that says that even though you may know the rules by which something operates, that does not mean that you can readily sort of be smarter than it and jump ahead and figure out what it's going to do.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That has been a question of science. I think that is some people's view of what science is about, and it's not clear that's the right view. In fact, as we live through this pandemic full of predictions and so on, it's an interesting moment to be pondering what science's actual role in those kinds of things is.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's had plenty of citations, but it's, you know, I think that people think of it as probably more conceptual inspiration than kind of this is a line from here to here to here in our particular field. I think that the thing which I am disappointed by and which will eventually happen is this kind of study of the sort of pure computationalism, this kind of study of the abstract behavior of the computational universe, that should be a big thing that lots of people do.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, it's happened except that people aren't the heroism of it may not be there, but that what's happened is for 300 years people basically said if you want to make a model of things in the world, mathematical equations are the best place to go. Last 15 years doesn't happen. You know, new models that get made of things most often are made with programs, not with equations. Now, you know, was that sort of going to happen anyway? Was that a consequence of my particular work and my particular book? It's hard to know for sure. I mean, I am always amazed at the amount of feedback that I get from people where they say, oh, by the way, you know, I started doing this whole line of research because I read your book, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, can you tell that from the academic literature, you know, was there a chain of academic reference? Probably not.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it ends up being like many things there's leadership, and there ends up being it's a lot easier for one person to have a crisp new idea than it is for a big committee to have a crisp new idea. And I think, you know, but I think it can happen that you have a great idea, but the world isn't ready for you. This has happened to me plenty, right? You have an idea. It's actually a pretty good idea, but things aren't ready either you're not really ready for it or the ambient world isn't ready for it. And it's hard to get the thing to get traction.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happens is it's a different way of thinking about things. It's a different methodology for studying things. And that opens stuff up.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a long story. And then, you know, as part of that process, I was like, okay, you can make simple programs, can make models of complicated things. What about the whole universe? That's our sort of ultimate example of a complicated thing. And so I got to thinking, you know, could we use these ideas to study fundamental physics? I happen to know a lot about traditional fundamental physics. My first, you know, I had a bunch of ideas about how to do this in the early 1990s. I made a bunch of technical progress. I figured out a bunch of things I thought were pretty interesting. I wrote about them back in 2002.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's gone. There's a couple of different stages to this. I mean, one is the think about the world computationally. Can we use programs instead of equations to make models of the world? That's something that I got interested in at the beginning of the 1980s. I did a bunch of computer experiments. When I first did them, I didn't really, I could see some significance to them, but it took me a few years to really say, wow, there's a big important phenomenon here that lets sort of complex things arise from very simple programs. That kind of happened back in 1984 or so. Then, you know, a bunch of other years go by. Then I start actually doing a lot of much more systematic computer experiments than things and find out that this phenomenon that I could only have said occurs in one particular case is actually something incredibly general. And then that led me to this thing called principle of computational equivalence.”
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 usually not the case. There was usually a long build up, but usually there's some methodological thing happens. And then there's a whole bunch of low-hanging fruit to be picked. And that usually lasts five or ten years. We see it today with machine learning and deep learning, neural nets and so on, methodological advance, things actually started working in 2011, 2012 and so on. And there's been this sort of rapid picking of low-hanging fruit, which is probably some significant fraction of the way done, 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
“Know who won the Nobel Prize for QCD people, David Gross, Frank Wilchek, you know, David Politzer, the people who are the sort of the slightly older generation, Dick Feynman, Murray Gelman, people like that who were Steve Weinberg, Gerd Hoft, his younger, he's in the younger group, actually. But these are all characters who are involved. I mean, it was funny because those are all people who are kind of, in my time, and I know them and they don't seem like sort of these historical iconic figures. They seem more like everyday characters, so to speak. And so it's always, you know, when you look at history from long afterwards, it always seems like everything happened instantly.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was kind of the Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Einstein have been a key figure originally Planck. Then Dirac was a little bit later. That was something that happened at that time before my time, right? In my time was in the 1970s, there was this sort of realization that quantum field theory was actually going to be useful in physics. And QCD, quantum chromatics theory of quarks and gluons and so on was really getting started. And there was again sort of big flurry of things happened then. I happened to be a teenager at that time and happened to be really involved in physics. And so I got to be part of that, which was really cool.”
2020-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #124 – Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source