When I was 13 or 14 years old, my father gave me a book, The Universe and Dr. Einstein. It explained both Special Relativity and General Relativity in a way that I found not only interesting, but enthralling. I couldn't wait to see what would happen next. I was shocked but delighted to find that science was actually capable of exploring questions that I had considered forever unknowable, such as the age, size and shape of the universe as a whole. WOW!!
So, I decided to be a cosmologist, which meant enrolling in a hard core math and physics program at university. I thought it would be no problem, since I was clearly the best student in my high school at math and physics. However, after 3 years of attempting to compete with my very smart classmates, I finally decided that I just wasn't good enough at math to do this, and moved on to other things.
For the rest of my life, I've maintained a keen amateur's interest in physics and astronomy. There have been plenty of interesting and exciting developments in the 60+ years since I read The U. and Dr. E., but nothing has given me that same feeling of completely new fields of thought opening up because of a new way of looking at things.
That is, until I started following the work of Stephen Wolfram. He and his colleagues are proposing a totally new basis for physics. It may come to nothing, or it may revolutionize physics once again. If it does become accepted, it will be a much more profound transformation than the revolution of the early 20th Century in which "classical" physics as founded by Newton and Leibniz was replaced by general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Both classical and modern physics are based on using differential equations to model the behaviour of physical objects and forces. Modern physics uses a different set of equations than classical, but the system is still based on the same notion of space and time as continuous variables, infinitely divisible into arbitrarily small parts. Wolfram's models on the contrary start with simple mathematical points which he has called "atoms of space", connected to each other to form something known in mathematics as a hypergraph, and which evolve as time passes by obeying a simple transformation rule, which determines what the next set of points and connections will be, based on the current set.
Space, time as we perceive it, particles, and the rules of physics (including all those differential equations) are emergent phenomena, which only appear when one takes a very high level view of a large chunk of such a hypergraph. So far, Wolfram and his colleagues claim to have reproduced both relativity and quantum mechanics from models of this type.
Wolfram is 62 years old. He was born in England, and attended the upper crust school Eton, but dropped out without graduating. He started publishing peer-reviewed papers on particle physics in serious journals at age 15 (which is unheard of). In 1978, when he was 19, he moved to California and started working with some of the world's most admired physicists, including the famous genius and raconteur, Richard Feynman. A year later, at age 20, with no degree, and not even a high school graduation diploma, the California Institute of Technology decided that he deserved a Ph.D. in particle physics. That's how smart Wolfram is.
Like a lot of really smart people, Wolfram also has quite a large ego. He shares with Trump the tendency to put his name on everything he does. The programming language he invented is the Wolfram Language. His company is called Wolfram Research. The publications that led me to write this post are part of the Wolfram Physics Project. Nonetheless, watching him in videos, he seems to be a decent enough person, and not dominated by feelings of superiority.
After he got his Ph.D., Wolfram continued his academic career for about 10 years, moving from one prestigious institution to another, and working with the most important people in his field. In 1988, he founded a company, Wolfram Research, to commercialize the software program Mathematica, which he had created while working at the University of Illinois. This immediately became the gold standard for symbolic math software, and its release was when I, a software developer, first heard about Wolfram. Anyway, the company seems to have been very successful financially, and it has done a number of other interesting projects, such as WolframAlpha.
I'd sort of like to write down more thoughts about Wolfram's current research, and the huge implications it holds for philosophy as well as many other areas of thought, but I don't want to just publish a lot of noise that nobody will want to read, so if any babblers are interested in reading about, and perhaps even discussing these things, please leave a comment.
