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Multicomputation: A Fourth Paradigm for Theoretical Science

Stephen Wolfram

But what I’ve increasingly been realizing is that actually it’s showing us something even bigger and deeper: a whole fundamentally new paradigm for making models and in general for doing theoretical science. But there remained plenty of phenomena—particularly associated with complexity—that this paradigm seemed to have little to say about.

Science 64
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How Did We Get Here? The Tangled History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

And indeed particularly in chemistry and engineering it’s often been in the background, justifying all the computations routinely done using entropy. There was also a sense that regardless of its foundations, the Second Law was successfully used in practice. His first significant work—in 1778—was entitled Memoir on the Theory of Machines.

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

Stephen Wolfram

But what I’ve increasingly been realizing is that actually it’s showing us something even bigger and deeper: a whole fundamentally new paradigm for making models and in general for doing theoretical science. But there remained plenty of phenomena—particularly associated with complexity—that this paradigm seemed to have little to say about.

Physics 64
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The Story Continues: Announcing Version 14 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

Stephen Wolfram

And in the past few months we’ve been steadily adding connections to the full range of popular LLMs, making Wolfram Language a unique hub not only for LLM usage, but also for studying the performance—and science—of LLMs. So did that mean we were “finished” with calculus? And in Version 14 there are significant advances around calculus.

Computer 102
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Expression Evaluation and Fundamental Physics

Stephen Wolfram

Since the standard Wolfram Language evaluator evaluates arguments first (“leftmost-innermost evaluation”), it therefore won’t terminate in this case—even though there are branches in the multiway evaluation (corresponding to “outermost evaluation”) that do terminate. As the Version 1.0

Physics 108
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Remembering the Improbable Life of Ed Fredkin (1934–2023) and His World of Ideas and Stories

Stephen Wolfram

Ed was someone who wanted to independently figure things out for himself, and delighted in presenting his often somewhat-outlandish conclusions—whether about technology, science, business or the world—with dramatic showman-like panache. I wrote about this in one chapter of my 2002 book A New Kind of Science.

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Computational Foundations for the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

The Second Law of thermodynamics is considered one of the great general principles of physical science. Sometimes textbooks will gloss over everything; sometimes they’ll give some kind of “common-sense-but-outside-of-physics argument”. Mechanical work irreversibly turns into heat. It almost seems like it’s going to be “provably true”.