Stephen Wolfram: Creator of Wolfram Language, Mathematica, and Wolfram|Alpha; founder of Wolfram Research and the new Wolfram Institute, leading the Wolfram Physics Project
What this episode covers
Tim Ferriss and Stephen Wolfram explore how Wolfram structures his thinking through 'matrices' (conceptual frameworks), and how he is finishing a physics project he began as a 12-year-old by mining decades of his own archived calendars, emails, and scanned documents. Wolfram lays out his Physics Project ideas: that space is made of discrete 'atoms' connected in a giant network, that the three big theories of 20th-century physics all derive from one object he calls the ruliad, and that time is the inexorable progress of computation. He explains computational irreducibility, quantum mechanics as a 'branching mind perceiving a branching universe,' and why he is skeptical of true quantum-computing advantage. The back half turns to personal productivity: live-streaming working meetings, video work logs, weekly Q&As, energy management, sleep, walking 10,000 steps daily, and a data-driven theory about why he gets sick after flights.
The guest's own work
Idea Makers
Stephen Wolfram
“I have not read this book of yours, but Idea Makers. It's a compilation of essays. How did you choose the players on the field for this?”— Tim Ferriss
Wolfram Language
Wolfram Research
“my main life work is building our computational language, Wolfram Language, which is this language that's supposed to represent everything in the world computationally.”— Stephen Wolfram
Wolfram|Alpha
Wolfram Research
“what we've done when we make our Wolfram|Alpha system and intelligent assistant uses of that and so on, what it's doing is it's taking a natural language question”— Stephen Wolfram
Mathematica
Wolfram Research
“I have to plug my life work, which my life work is building Wolfram Language and Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica and so on, which are all part of the same idea”— Stephen Wolfram
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Encyclopedia Britannica
“I own the set of Encyclopedia Britannica that he bought when he was, I think, 43 years old. I ended up buying it on my 43rd birthday”— Tim Ferriss
Google Translate
“looking at the progression, say, in Google Translate from my last trip to Japan, which was pre-COVID, to just about six weeks ago, it is astonishing”— Tim Ferriss
Big reveals from this episode
- Wolfram reveals he is finishing a project he started at age 12 about the second law of thermodynamics, now solvable via his fundamental theory of physics.
- His key intellectual achievement, realized ~35 years later, was recognizing that being unable to figure out simple programs (computational irreducibility) was itself the most important fact.
- He argues space has an inner structure made of discrete 'atoms of space' connected in a giant network, and everything in the universe is like an eddy in that network.
- All three big 20th-century physics theories (general relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics) come from the same place and are derivable from the ruliad.
- After a lifetime hearing Feynman say nobody understands quantum mechanics, Wolfram claims he finally does: it's a branching mind perceiving a branching universe.
- Wolfram defines time as the inexorable progress of computation, and explains that at a black hole's center time stops because no more updates can be applied.
- He is not hopeful about true quantum computing advantage, arguing that knitting together threads of history may be as costly as the parallelism gained.
- Using 27 years of personal sickness data, he found getting sick correlated with being on a flight two days earlier, and now pre-medicates with wheat germ and choline.
Worth remembering
- Wolfram has kept all his email for 30 years, scans of roughly a quarter million pages of paper documents, and records keystrokes and screen captures.
- He started recording all keystrokes about 25 years ago after a computer crash lost his work; he can check things like whether he types faster on a new keyboard.
- He explains cellular automata: a row of black/white cells updated by simple rules can produce patterns so complex they look completely random.
- Feynman would do complicated math, then find an intuitive shortcut and throw away the math, telling people only the intuition so they couldn't reverse-engineer it.
- Ramanujan, frustrated by demands for proofs, told English mathematicians a goddess revealed formulas to him in dreams; he was actually an exceptional calculator.
- Wolfram live-streams many of his company's software design review meetings, drawing world experts who show up to help shape tools they'll be using.
- He records video work logs of himself working alone, recently five hours in one night, so people can later watch the exact minute he figured something out.
- For the last three years he has walked more than 10,000 steps every single day, making it a hard constraint his schedulers must accommodate even at airports.
- He has worked more than 12 hours a day, basically every day, for the last 50 years, and is not retired unlike his elementary-school reunion classmates.
- He recently launched the Wolfram Institute to function as a 'machine' for producing basic science, separate from his 800-person, 36-year-old company.