From clockwork to computation in Wolfram Physics with Jonathan Gorard

The Last Theory

This is the second of a series of excerpts from my recent conversation with Jonathan Gorard, who was instrumental in the founding of The Wolfram Physics Project.

I asked Jonathan why he found the computational approach to physics so compelling.

In his answer, he broached a wide range of fascinating topics in the philosophy of science:

• how we moved from a clockwork paradigm in the age of clockwork to a computational paradigm in the age of computation;
• how saying that the universe is computational is different from saying that the universe is a computer;
• how our adoption of mathematics as the basis for physics has biased us to think of space-time as continuous;
• how the history of science might have been different had Turing been born before Newton;
• how the Wolfram Model can be thought of as a way of building a constructivist foundation for physics.

This led us to discuss a couple of the deeper questions of Wolfram Physics:

• is it possible to know whether the universe is continuous or discrete?
• does the hypergraph really exist?

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Jonathan Gorard

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

• The Centre for Applied Compositionality
• The Wolfram Physics Project

People and Concepts mentioned by Jonathan

• Isaac Newton
• René Descartes

• Democritus
• John Locke
• Bishop Berkeley

• Corpuscularianism
• Atomism

• Alan Turing

• Turing machines
• Lambda calculus
• Recursively Enumerable Functions

• Constructivism

• L. E. J. Brouwer
• David Hilbert

• Intuitionism

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

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