“I realized I’d been working more than 12 hours a day, every day, for basically all of the last 50 years. And I’m having a good time, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to mostly do things that add energy to me rather than taking it away.”

— Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram (@stephen_wolfram) is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; the originator of the Wolfram Physics Project; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of more than four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking, and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions, and innovations in science, technology, and business.

Please enjoy!

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Want to hear another episode that ponders the nature of the universe and examines the role of consciousness? Have a listen to my conversation with Professor Donald Hoffman here, in which we discuss how perception may influence the physical world, the holographic model of the universe, panpsychism (and influential panpsychists), cosmological polytope, the use of hallucinogenic drugs to tap into deeper reality and interact with conscious agents, QBism, the probability of zero that humans evolved to see reality in full, the science of consciousness, and much more wild stuff.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with Stephen Wolfram:

Website | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

• A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram | Amazon
• Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People by Stephen Wolfram | Amazon
• Modern Technical Computing | Wolfram Mathematica
• Computational Intelligence | Wolfram|Alpha
• Programming Language + Built-In Knowledge | Wolfram Language
• Finding the Fundamental Theory of Physics | The Wolfram Physics Project
• Computation Meets Knowledge | Wolfram Research
• Advancing the Foundational Study of Physical, Technological, Natural, and Abstract Systems Through the Paradigm of Computation | Wolfram Institute
• Final Agenda Announced for First-Ever WIRED Health Conference: Living By Numbers, Featuring Keynote Speakers Michael Graves and Stephen Wolfram | Wired
• Stephen Wolfram AMA | Reddit
• How We Got Here: The Backstory of the Wolfram Physics Project | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• The Making of A New Kind of Science | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• Second Law of Thermodynamics | NASA
• After 100 Years, Can We Finally Crack Post’s Problem of Tag? A Story of Computational Irreducibility, and More | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• For Math Fans: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Number 42 | Scientific American
• The Dog That Didn’t Bark in the Night: Appellate Court of Connecticut Uses Sherlock Holmes to Solve Hearsay Mystery | EvidenceProf Blog
• What We’ve Built Is a Computational Language (and That’s Very Important!) | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• Programming with Natural Language Is Actually Going to Work | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• Google Translate
• Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• Who Was Ramanujan? | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• Ramanujan’s Formula for Pi | Ben Lynn
• Clarke’s Three Laws | New Scientist
• On the Concept of Motion | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• Zero-Point Quantum Fluctuations in Cosmology | University of Geneva
• General Relativity Explained in 7 Levels of Difficulty | MinutePhysics
• The Origin of Quantum Mechanics (Feat. Neil Turok) | MinutePhysics
• Statistical Mechanics | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics… and It’s Beautiful | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• The Concept of the Ruliad | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• Newtonian Physics and Relativity | The Print
• Multicomputation: A Fourth Paradigm for Theoretical Science | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• Earth-TRN713 | Marvel Database
• What Does the Copernican Principle Say About Life in the Universe? | Big Think
• What Happens at the Center of a Black Hole? | Space
• Stephen Wolfram: Quantum Mechanics Emerges From the Multiway Causal Graph | Lex Fridman Podcast
• Buzzword Convergence: Making Sense of Quantum Neural Blockchain AI | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• Why Is Quantum Computing So Hard to Explain? | Quanta Magazine
• Professor Donald Hoffman — The Case Against Reality, Beyond Spacetime, Rethinking Death, Panpsychism, QBism, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #585
• Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure | Stephen Wolfram Writings
• Stephen Wolfram Livestreams
• CDP Choline | Amazon
• Bob’s Red Mill Wheat Germ | Amazon

SHOW NOTES

Editor’s note: Timestamps will be added shortly.

• How Stephen collects information for his vast personal archives.
• When a situation warrants building a matrix.
• Science sometimes makes us look far back to move incrementally forward.
• Befriending the computational.
• How technology helps us navigate natural language.
• How Stephen chose subjects for his book Idea Makers.
• On spending time with Richard Feynman.
• Thoughts on Srinivasa Ramanujan.
• When Stephen started solving science problems with computers.
• Heresies today, gospels tomorrow.
• Ruminations on the ruliad.
• What is time?
• What constitutes consciousness?
• Personal infrastructure and productivity.
• Maintaining energy in the midst of a busy life.
• Avoiding once-inevitable sickness after air travel.
• Making time count — in sickness and in health.
• Parting thoughts.

MORE STEPHEN WOLFRAM QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“Even very simple programs can do very complicated things. That was something I didn’t expect. It was a violation of my intuition. It took me a couple of years to come to terms with the fact that that was possible.”

— Stephen Wolfram

“A big part of what I’ve spent my life doing is building this kind of computational language, which [allows us to] represent [something] computationally in a precise way … a human could read it and say, ‘Oh, I know what that means.’ But also we have the extra boost from the fact that a computer can read it too, and then the computer can help us to get further.”

— Stephen Wolfram

“To what extent can we translate the things we think we care about into something which can be represented computationally?”

— Stephen Wolfram

“The thing to understand about translation, ultimately, is the destination mind isn’t built the same way the source mind is necessarily built.”

— Stephen Wolfram

“There’s a certain art to doing a good computer experiment, but you can discover things that you never thought were there, and they inform your intuition and allow you to build things up. It’s this thing that comes from nowhere. Because it’s just coming, not from the natural world, but the computational world. You’re just turning over this rock in the computational world and suddenly you discover that there’s this whole crazy thing going on underneath it.”

— Stephen Wolfram

“I think I can finally say I think I actually understand quantum mechanics. And it’s just this idea of the branching mind perceiving the branching universe. I hadn’t seen that coming at all. And it’s a bizarre idea that turns out, I think, to unlock how that works.”

— Stephen Wolfram

“You can attribute different rules to the operation of the universe, but they’re convertible, in the same way as your computer can be made to run a spreadsheet rather than a word processor.”

— Stephen Wolfram

“You were asking about different human languages. That’s an example of being in different places in rulial space. So you can imagine two languages where the way of thinking about the world is very similar, they kind of correspond to nearby places in rulial space, where it’s pretty easy to translate, to travel from one to the other. Whereas very different sorts of views of the world are further away in rulial space. And that’s just a way of perhaps conceptualizing what this thing is about.”

— Stephen Wolfram

“I realized I’d been working more than 12 hours a day, every day, for basically all of the last 50 years. And I’m having a good time, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to mostly do things that add energy to me rather than taking it away.”

— Stephen Wolfram

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