Institute Output

On the Concept of Motion
Stephen Wolfram
It seems like the kind of question that might have been hotly debated by ancient philosophers, but would have been settled long ago: how is it that things can move? And indeed with the view of physical space that’s been almost universally adopted for the past two thousand years it’s basically a non-question. As crystallized by the likes of Euclid it’s been assumed that space is ultimately just a kind of “geometrical background” into which any physical thing can be put—and then moved around.

Pregeometric Spaces from Wolfram Model Rewriting Systems as Homotopy Types
Xerxes D. Arsiwalla, Jonathan Gorard
The study explores how spatial structures in physics can emerge from pregeometric combinatorial models governed by computational rules, using higher category theory and homotopy types.