Stephen Wolfram: Computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist who founded Wolfram Research, creating Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, and the Wolfram Language. He authored 'A New Kind of Science' and leads the Wolfram Physics Project.
What this episode covers
Wolfram returns for his third appearance to update Lex on the Wolfram Physics Project, which models the universe as a hypergraph of 'atoms of space' continuously rewritten by simple rules. He argues that relativity, quantum mechanics, and gravity all emerge naturally once you accept that observers are computationally bounded and perceive a single thread of time. The conversation builds toward the 'ruliad', the entangled running of all possible computational rules, as a necessary formal object that explains why the universe exists at all. Wolfram then extends the same multicomputational paradigm to mathematics, chemistry, biology, immunology, economics, and blockchain. He closes by calling for new fields he names 'metamodeling' and 'ruliology,' the pure basic science of what simple rules do in the wild.
Recommended on this episode
Rudy Rucker novels (nanobot 'nants' series)
Rudy Rucker
“I've got one example great great uh collection of books from my friend Rudy Rooker which were um uh which I have to say”— guest
The guest's own work
A New Kind of Science
Stephen Wolfram
“almost 20 years ago you published A New Kind of Science where you presented a study of complexity and an approach for modeling of complex systems”— Lex Fridman
Mathematica
Wolfram Research
“wol from language is what people use and have been using for the last 33 years actually Mathematica which is its first instantiation”— guest
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Research
“wol malfa is kind of the consumer version of that where you're just using natural language as input the um and it turns it into our symbolic language”— guest
Wolfram Language
Wolfram Research
“our wolam language which is our attempt to kind of represent everything in the world computationally and it's the thing I kind of started building 40 years ago”— guest
Combinators: A Centennial View
Stephen Wolfram
“this new book I wrote about combinators is is full of stuff like this”— guest
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Cardano
Charles Hoskinson
“we've been doing a bit of stuff with nfts and we just did some nfts on cardano and we'll be doing some more”— guest
Big reveals from this episode
- Wolfram claims fundamental physics no longer needs any underlying randomness: 'we can get what we see without' an extra dice being thrown.
- He says he was surprised he can now actually address why the universe exists, a question even philosophers had avoided.
- He reframes consciousness as a step DOWN from intelligence, defined by just two limits: computational boundedness and a single thread of time.
- He gives a mechanical explanation of time dilation: moving 'uses up' computation, leaving less to tick the clock.
- The ruliad is the entangled running of all possible computational rules, making the universe a 'necessary object' like 2+2=4 that must exist.
- Wolfram admits his mathematician wife was right for 25 years that he was wrong about the foundations of mathematics.
- He argues general relativity and quantum mechanics are 'the same law' in his model, inevitable for any bounded observer.
- After seeding the complexity field at Santa Fe decades ago, he admits 'eye rolling' at what the thousand complexity institutes became.
Worth remembering
- Rule 30, a one-line cellular automaton starting from a single black cell, produces genuinely complex, random-seeming patterns.
- Computational irreducibility means you cannot jump ahead, to know rule 30 after a million steps you must actually run a million steps.
- In Wolfram's model space is made of discrete 'atoms of space'; particles like electrons are tangles, like vortices in a fluid.
- The model adds a parameter, roughly 10^170 simultaneous quantum threads of execution, setting an elementary length near 10^-100 meters.
- Quantum mechanics isn't a plug-in: a 'branching brain' perceiving a 'branching universe' is the core of how it arises.
- The very early universe may have been effectively infinite-dimensional, becoming three-dimensional as it expanded.
- Godel's theorem is recast as the 'computational irreducibility' of mathematics, you can't finitely grind out all true theorems.
- Mathematica turns one-third of a century (33 and a third years) old in October, a notable slice of the computer industry's age.
- Cellular automaton rule 184 is a minimal model for road traffic flow, showing simple rules map directly onto real phenomena.
- One of Wolfram's goals is to 'compute the primes with molecules' using an Emerald Cloud automated lab driven by Wolfram Language.