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 crowdsourced 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.
To help his explorers, Wolfram has written over 800 pages of documents, and his collaborators have produced three papers of their own. Wolfram, a digital pack rat, has also recorded many of the brainstorming meetings between himself and his collaborators and is releasing 430 hours or so of videos. (Even sheltering in place won’t give you enough time for that!)
It’s an understatement to say this project is unusual, and many traditional physicists will regard it as folly. But the project is totally in character for Wolfram, whose career includes a MacArthur Foundation fellowship—also known as a “Genius Grant”—at age 21; a stint at the Institute of Advanced Study (Einstein’s former home); the founding of his company; the invention of the Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine; creating a calculation tool (Mathematica); and writing Wolfram Language, a full-scale computational computer language.
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