Wolfram Physics Project

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.

Stephen Wolfram

One of the many surprising (and to me, unexpected) implications of our Physics Project is its suggestion of a very deep correspondence between the foundations of physics and mathematics. We might have imagined that physics would have certain laws, and mathematics would have certain theories, and that while they might be historically related, there wouldn’t be any fundamental formal correspondence between them. 

But what our Physics Project suggests is that underneath everything we physically experience there is a single very general abstract structure—that we call the ruliad—and that our physical laws arise in an inexorable way from the particular samples we take of this structure.

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.

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.

Stephen Wolfram

Why does the universe exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? These are old and fundamental questions that one might think would be firmly outside the realm of science. But to my surprise I’ve recently realized that our Physics Project may shed light on them, and perhaps even show us the way to answers.

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.