Is everything that’s ever going to happen in the universe already determined?

Or does something else – maybe randomness, maybe free will – play a role?

Stephen Wolfram’s answer to this question is straightforward: the ruliad is fully determined.

But there’s a twist. The ruliad is determined, but how we observe the evolution of the universe depends on where we are in the ruliad.

In a fascinating introduction to the role of the observer in the Wolfram model, Stephen touches on some of the deepest philosophical questions in physics, finishing on one of the deepest: is there an objective reality?

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Stephen Wolfram

• Stephen Wolfram
• The Wolfram Physics Project
• Wolfram Institute
• Wolfram Institute Community Discord

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The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery founder of Open Web Mind

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

Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.

Hypergraphs can have any number of dimensions. They can be 2-dimensional, 3-dimensional, 4.81-dimensional or, in the limit, ∞-dimensional.

So how does the three-dimensional space we observe emerge from the hypergraph-based Wolfram model?

Why is space three-dimensional?

Stephen Wolfram’s surprising answer to this questions goes deep into space, time, computation and, crucially, our nature as observers.

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Stephen Wolfram

• Stephen Wolfram
• The Wolfram Physics Project
• Wolfram Institute
• Wolfram Institute Community Discord

People mentioned by Stephen

• Euclid
• Hermann Minkowski

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The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery, founder of Open Web Mind

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

Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.

Stephen Wolfram reveals that his first major wow along the path towards a fundamental theory of physics was his realization that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are the same theory, played out in different kinds of space.

Many other dominos have fallen along the way, from the derivation of Einstein’s equations to applications of the ruliad beyond physics.

But the aspect of Wolfram Physics that Stephen Wolfram himself finds maybe the most compelling is this mirroring of the two pillars of twentieth century physics.

Perhaps General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics aren’t as incompatible as they’ve so long seemed.

In this first excerpt from my conversation with Stephen Wolfram, he tells the story of how he came to apply hypergraphs and hypergraph rewriting rules to the universe itself, and arrived at the first traces of a path towards what might be the last theory of physics.

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Stephen Wolfram

• Stephen Wolfram
• The Wolfram Physics Project
• Wolfram Institute
• Wolfram Institute Community Discord

People mentioned by Stephen

• Max Piskunov
• Jonathan Gorard

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The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery, founder of Open Web Mind

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

Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.