Stephen Wolfram

JANUARY 31, 2023

It began partly as an empirical law, and partly as something abstractly constructed on the basis of the idea of molecules, that nobody at the time knew for sure existed. But what’s important for our purposes here is that in the setup Carnot constructed he basically ended up introducing the Second Law.

Energy 88

Energy Physics Argumentation Mathematics 88

Stephen Wolfram

MARCH 5, 2024

A lot of science—and technology—has been constructed specifically around computationally reducible phenomena. And that’s for example why things like mathematical formulas have been able to be as successful in science as they have. It’s not exactly “solving science”, and it wouldn’t even allow one to “discover the unexpected”.

Science 122

Science Sciences Computer Mathematics 122

Stephen Wolfram

AUGUST 22, 2023

He was going for what he saw as the big prize: using them to “construct the universe”. The next section is entitled “The Design of a Simulator”, and discusses how such hardware could be constructed, concluding that a 1000×1000×1000 3D grid of cells could be built for $50M (or nearly half a billion dollars today). It’s just my nature.

Computer 68

Computer Physics Science Sciences 68