Stephen Wolfram isn’t a house hold name yet but he should be. A highly regarded physicist and mathematician, Wolfram is more keen on using computers instead of traditional long-hand math to derive his theories and work out his computations. If Richard Fenyman is what you think of when you think of a classical physicist (a brilliant old-school professorial type doing his own calculations in isolation) then Wolfram is representative of what the next wave of physicists may resemble: analytical, insightful, and above all else – computer savvy.
So much so, that he is perhaps most well-known for creating an entire website, a computational search engine known as WolframAlpha, dedicated to helping others understand the mysteries of the Universe either by assisting them with their homework or satiating their general curiosity.
However, Wolfram is also well-known for something else: his actual work in the field of mathematics and specifically for his discovery of Rule 30, the idea that complexity can arise from simple rules once scaled up.
In theory, such a rule could actually explain why all the laws of physics are the way they are. Implying that they aren’t necessarily Universal Laws that would appear in every iteration of a Universe, but are rather just the end result of being in a Universe governed by whatever particular rules that Universe happened to start with. Figure out what that basic rule is and you could derive all possible physics, the Universal Laws that we’ve already discovered and those that have yet to be discovered.
That insight has led Wolfram to his latest endeavor: a desire (one shared by all physicists) to come up with an elusive Theory of Everything that would explain and unify all known physical phenomenon in the Universe into a single eloquent solution. An endeavor that he is now ready to share with the entire world.
As Wired explains:
“The novel coronavirus has derailed everyday existence for all of us, forcing us to make difficult choices. But a few weeks ago, Stephen Wolfram’s dilemma was unique. What should you do, he wondered, if, right in the middle of a pandemic, you were ready to announce that you had made historical progress—at least as you saw it—toward solving a fundamental physics question? If you felt you had figured out the path to the Holy Grail of Physics: a unified theory, making it possible for the first time to discover the underlying rule of our entire universe, one that intertwines relativity, gravity, and quantum mechanics with an elegant coherence? And what if you were ready to release the tools and background materials that would enable a crowd-sourced effort to take physicists over the finish line?
‘My original thought was that we should wait,’ Wolfram says via Zoom from his home in Massachusetts, ‘that it’s kind of disrespectful to release an irrelevant, intellectual thing when people are having all this trouble with this pandemic.’
But then Wolfram, who splits his time between science (he began as a particle physicist and in 2002 wrote a controversial 1,280-page manifesto about the computational nature of the universe) and commerce (he’s the CEO of the 800-person company Wolfram Research), started getting emails from friends, acquaintances, and total strangers stuck at home, who suddenly had time to pursue intellectual projects. He realized that a world sheltered at home might provide the perfect army to search for a single rule that governs our universe. “We could wait for six months or something for the pandemic to clear out. But a lot of people are sitting at home wanting to think about intellectual things, and we’ve got an intellectual thing that I think is interesting,” he asks. “Why don’t we just release it?”
So today marks the debut of the Wolfram Physics Project. (Wolfram is an artist of the eponymous, having named previous products Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language, Wolfram Data Framework, and so on.) The physics project lays out the theories of its 60-year-old creator, provides documentation for his claims that he has already made progress in understanding space, time, and the nature of elementary particles, and invites everyone to join in the search to decode fundamental physics. Basically, the project involves creating graph-like models of many possible universes, as defined by rules that determine how the model evolves. As the graphs become more complex—really more complex—they generate phenomena that’s worthy of study in themselves. If the rules are right, one can ‘discover’ in them the real physics that govern our universe—everything from E=mc2 to the law of gravity.”
So is Wolfram really onto something? Has he really given humanity all the tools we need to complete our understanding of physics, akin to giving someone completing a jigsaw puzzle in the dark a light and the box with the picture on it?
I’m not sure. But what I can say after reading his book Idea Makers in which he profiled famous mathematicians, physicists, and scientific figures like Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Steve Jobs, Benoit Mandelbrot, and Srinivasa Ramanujan is that he has an expert level amount of knowledge when it comes to physics and math as he is capable of understanding and explaining pretty much every possible proof, theorem, and equation known to man. And then going a step beyond that to actually invent tools to help him and others understand everything at an even higher level. So, if anyone can put it all together and actually come up with an elusive Theory of Everything it’s him.
Has Stephen Wolfram finally come up with an elusive Theory of Everything?
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