Institute Output
On the Nature of Time
Stephen Wolfram
Time is a central feature of human experience. But what actually is it? In traditional scientific accounts it’s often represented as some kind of coordinate much like space (though a coordinate that for some reason is always systematically increasing for us). But while this may be a useful mathematical description, it’s not telling us anything about what time in a sense “intrinsically is”.
Observer Theory
Stephen Wolfram
We call it perception. We call it measurement. We call it analysis. But in the end it’s about how we take the world as it is, and derive from it the impression of it that we have in our minds.
Aggregation and Tiling as Multicomputational Processes
Stephen Wolfram
Multiway systems have a central role in our Physics Project, particularly in connection with quantum mechanics. But what’s now emerging is that multiway systems in fact serve as a quite general foundation for a whole new “multicomputational” paradigm for modeling.
Expression Evaluation and Fundamental Physics
Stephen Wolfram
It is shown that way the Wolfram Language rewrites and evaluates expressions mirrors the universe’s own evolution: both proceed through discrete events linked by causal relationships, form “spacetime-like” structures and branch into multiway histories analogous to quantum superpositions.
Axiomatic Quantum Field Theory in Discrete Spacetime via Multiway Causal Structure: The Case of Entanglement Entropies
Jonathan Gorard, Julia Dannemann-Freitag
This research examines a covariant approach to entanglement entropy in discrete quantum gravity, comparing causal set and Wolfram model frameworks to reveal a monotonic relationship.
Games and Puzzles as Multicomputational Systems
Stephen Wolfram
Multicomputation is one of the core ideas of the Wolfram Physics Project—and in particular is at the heart of our emerging understanding of quantum mechanics. But how can one get an intuition for what is initially the rather abstract idea of multicomputation? A good approach, I believe, is to see it in action in familiar systems and situations. And I explore here what seems like a particularly good example: games and puzzles.
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.
Multicomputation with Numbers: The Case of Simple Multiway Systems
Stephen Wolfram
Multicomputation is an important new paradigm, but one that can be quite difficult to understand. Here my goal is to discuss a minimal example: multiway systems based on numbers. Many general multicomputational phenomena will show up here in simple forms (though others will not). And the involvement of numbers will often allow us to make immediate use of traditional mathematical methods.
Multicomputation: A Fourth Paradigm for Theoretical Science
Stephen Wolfram
One might have thought it was already exciting enough for our Physics Project to be showing a path to a fundamental theory of physics and a fundamental description of how our physical universe works. 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. And I fully expect that this new paradigm will give us ways to address a remarkable range of longstanding central problems in all sorts of areas of science—as well as suggesting whole new areas and new directions to pursue.
The Problem of Distributed Consensus
Stephen Wolfram
In any decentralized system with computers, people, databases, measuring devices or anything else one can end up with different values or results at different “nodes”. But for all sorts of reasons one often wants to agree on a single “consensus” value, that one can for example use to “make a decision and go on to the next step”.
Multiway Turing Machines
Stephen Wolfram
Over the years I’ve studied the simplest ordinary Turing machines quite a bit, but I’ve barely looked at multiway Turing machines (also known as nondeterministic Turing machines or NDTMs). Recently, though, I realized that multiway Turing machines can be thought of as “maximally minimal” models both of concurrent computing and of the way we think about quantum mechanics in our Physics Project. So now this piece is my attempt to “do the obvious explorations” of multiway Turing machines.