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How Did We Get Here? The Tangled History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

Already the steam-engine works our mines, impels our ships, excavates our ports and our rivers, forges iron, fashions wood, grinds grain, spins and weaves our cloths, transports the heaviest burdens, etc. It appears that it must some day serve as a universal motor, and be substituted for animal power, water-falls, and air currents.

Energy 88
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Even beyond Physics: Introducing Multicomputation as a Fourth General Paradigm for Theoretical Science

Stephen Wolfram

Events are like functions, whose “arguments” are incoming tokens, and whose output is one or more outgoing tokens. Chemistry / Molecular Biology. But in thinking about molecular computing it may be crucial—and perhaps it’s also necessary for understanding molecular biology. There are many.

Physics 65
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Multicomputation: A Fourth Paradigm for Theoretical Science

Stephen Wolfram

Events are like functions, whose “arguments” are incoming tokens, and whose output is one or more outgoing tokens. Chemistry / Molecular Biology. But in thinking about molecular computing it may be crucial—and perhaps it’s also necessary for understanding molecular biology. There are many.

Science 64
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Remembering the Improbable Life of Ed Fredkin (1934–2023) and His World of Ideas and Stories

Stephen Wolfram

It didn’t help that his knowledge of physics was at best spotty (and, for example, I don’t think he ever really learned calculus). Richard Feynman and I would get into very fierce arguments. Ed was a serious (and, by all reports, exceptionally good) pilot—with an airplane transport pilot license (plus seaplane and glider licenses).

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Computational Foundations for the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

Sometimes textbooks will gloss over everything; sometimes they’ll give some kind of “common-sense-but-outside-of-physics argument”. Once one has the idea of “equilibrium”, one can then start to think of its properties as purely being functions of certain parameters—and this opens up all sorts of calculus-based mathematical opportunities.

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The Concept of the Ruliad

Stephen Wolfram

The global structures of metamathematics , economics , linguistics and evolutionary biology seem likely to provide examples—and in each case we can expect that at the core is the ruliad, with its unique structure. But what about other models of computation—like cellular automata or register machines or lambda calculus?

Physics 122