The founding of the Wolfram Physics Project with Jonathan Gorard

The Last Theory

In 2019, Jonathan Gorard and Max Piskunov goaded Stephen Wolfram into pursuing his ideas for a new kind of science.

This led to the announcement of The Wolfram Physics Project in 2020.

Last week, I talked to Jonathan Gorard about the revolutionary ideas that have come out of the project.

In this first excerpt from our conversation, Jonathan talks about his instrumental role in the founding of The Wolfram Physics Project.

We cover why the time was right in 2020... and why it had been wrong in 2002 when Stephen Wolfram published his book A New Kind of Science.

We talk about how Wolfram Physics might take over from string theory, why Jonathan likes string theory... and why he doesn’t.

It was a true pleasure to talk to Jonathan about what might prove a pivotal moment in the history of science.

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Jonathan Gorard

• Jonathan Gorard at The Wolfram Physics Project
• Jonathan Gorard at Cardiff University

People and Projects

• The Centre for Applied Compositionality
• The Wolfram Physics Project
• Stephen Wolfram’s announcement of the project
• Max Piskunov
• SetReplace on GitHub

Concepts mentioned by Jonathan

• Irreducibility
• Undecidability
• Universality
• Current algebra
• Regge theory
• Gauge theory
• Standard Model
• String theory
• Poincaré group
• Mirror symmetry
• Calabi–Yau manifold
• K3 surface

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Images

• Calabi–Yau manifold CalabiYau5 by Andrew J. Hanson, Indiana University, who allows use with attribution
• Feynman diagram Feynmann Diagram Gluon Radiation by Joel Holdsworth, public domain

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I release The Last Theory as a video too! Watch here.

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