Institute Output
An Invitation to Higher Arity Science
Carlos Zapata-Carratalá, Xerxes D. Arsiwalla
Exploration of a wide range of higher-order phenomena across multiple disciplines and the preliminary application of hypergraph and hypermatrix methods.
Can AI Solve Science?
Stephen Wolfram
Particularly given its recent surprise successes, there’s a somewhat widespread belief that eventually AI will be able to “do everything”, or at least everything we currently do. So what about science? Over the centuries we humans have made incremental progress, gradually building up what’s now essentially the single largest intellectual edifice of our civilization. But despite all our efforts, there are still all sorts of scientific questions that remain. So can AI now come in and just solve all of them?
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.
Computational General Relativity in the Wolfram Language using Gravitas II: ADM Formalism and Numerical Relativity
Jonathan Gorard
This paper introduces the Gravitas computational general relativity framework's numerical subsystem, emphasizing its ability to perform 3 + 1 spacetime decompositions via the ADM formalism, handle complex simulations of gravitational phenomena like binary black hole mergers, and leverage adaptive refinement algorithms based on hypergraph rewriting within the Wolfram Language.
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.
Ruliology: Linking Computation, Observers and Physical Law
Dean Rickles, Hatem Elshatlawy, Xerxes D. Arsiwalla
Physical laws arise from the sampling of the Ruliad by observers (including us). This naturally leads to several conceptual issues, such as what kind of object is the Ruliad? What is the nature of the observers carrying out the sampling, and how do they relate to the Ruliad itself? What is the precise nature of the sampling? This paper provides a philosophical examination of these questions, and other related foundational issues, including the identification of a limitation that must face any attempt to describe or model reality in such a way that the modeller-observers are included.
Computational General Relativity in the Wolfram Language using Gravitas I: Symbolic and Analytic Computation
Jonathan Gorard
Gravitas introduces a robust computational framework for general relativity in the Wolfram Language, featuring seamless integration of symbolic and numerical tools to handle complex spacetime geometries and solve the Einstein field equations.
Biunit pairs in semiheaps and associated semigroups
Bernard Rybołowicz, Carlos Zapata-Carratalá
This research introduces biunit pairs in semiheaps, and establishes a direct correspondence between monoids with specific switches and semiheaps, leading to the novel concept of diheaps.
Generative AI Space and the Mental Imagery of Alien Minds
Stephen Wolfram
How do alien minds perceive the world? It’s an old and oft-debated question in philosophy. And it now turns out to also be a question that rises to prominence in connection with the concept of the ruliad that’s emerged from our Wolfram Physics Project.
Hypermatrix Algebra and Irreducible Arity in Higher-Order Systems: Concepts and Perspectives
Carlos Zapata-Carratalá, Maximilian Schich, Taliesin Beynon, Xerxes D. Arsiwalla
Hypergraph and hypermatrix methods are applied to detect irreducible interactions in higher-order systems.
Non-Vacuum Solutions, Gravitational Collapse and Discrete Singularity Theorems in Wolfram Model Systems
Jonathan Gorard
This study extends the Raychaudhuri equation to discrete spacetimes, exploring conditions under which they might exhibit geodesic incompleteness, and applies numerical simulations to predict black hole formations.
What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
Stephen Wolfram
That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what’s going on inside ChatGPT—and then to explore why it is that it can do so well in producing what we might consider to be meaningful text.
Computational Foundations for the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Stephen Wolfram
Entropy increases. Mechanical work irreversibly turns into heat. The Second Law of thermodynamics is considered one of the great general principles of physical science. But 150 years after it was first introduced, there’s still something deeply mysterious about the Second Law. It almost seems like it’s going to be “provably true”. But one never quite gets there; it always seems to need something extra. Sometimes textbooks will gloss over everything; sometimes they’ll give some kind of “common-sense-but-outside-of-physics argument”. But the mystery of the Second Law has never gone away.
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.
Alien Intelligence and the Concept of Technology
Stephen Wolfram
“We’re going to launch lots of tiny spacecraft into interstellar space, have them discover alien intelligence, then bring back its technology to advance human technology by a million years”.
But as I thought about it, I realized that beyond the “absurdly extreme moonshot” character of this pitch, there’s some science that I’ve done that makes it clear that it’s also fundamentally philosophically confused. The nature of the confusion is interesting, however, and untangling it will give us an opportunity to illuminate some deep features of both intelligence and technology—and in the end suggest a way to think about the long-term trajectory of the very concept of technology and its relation to our universe.
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.
Diagrammatic calculus and generalized associativity for higher-arity tensor operations
Carlos Zapata-Carratalá, Xerxes D. Arsiwalla, Taliesin Beynon
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.