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”.
General Relativistic Hydrodynamics in Discrete Spacetime: Perfect Fluid Accretion onto Static and Spinning Black Holes
Jonathan Gorard
This study investigates the effect of spacetime discretization on accretion dynamics of a relativistic fluid onto a spinning black hole, specifically noting that accretion rates decrease with increased discretization scale and that drag force sensitivity and instabilities intensify at critical discretization values.
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.
The Wolfram Physics Project: A One-Year Update
Stephen Wolfram
When we launched the Wolfram Physics Project a year ago today, I was fairly certain that—to my great surprise—we’d finally found a path to a truly fundamental theory of physics, and it was beautiful. A year later it’s looking even better. We’ve been steadily understanding more and more about the structure and implications of our models—and they continue to fit beautifully with what we already know about physics, particularly connecting with some of the most elegant existing approaches, strengthening and extending them, and involving the communities that have developed them.
Event Horizons, Singularities and Other Exotic Spacetime Phenomena
Stephen Wolfram
In our models, space emerges as the large-scale limit of our spatial hypergraph, while spacetime effectively emerges as the large-scale limit of the causal graph that represents causal relationships between updating events in the spatial hypergraph. An important result is that (subject to various assumptions) there is a continuum limit in which the emergent spacetime follows Einstein’s equations from general relativity.