I never expected this: finally we may have a path to the fundamental theory of physics...and it's beautiful
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finall
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Stephen Wolfram
@stephen_wolfram
I create ideas, technology, science, companies, books, ...: #WolfLang #WolframPhysics #WolframAlpha #Mathematica
stephenwolfram.comJoined April 2009
Stephen Wolfram’s Tweets
2.5 months later...in collaboration with , ChatGPT gets its "Wolfram superpowers"!
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/chatgp
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You never know where science will take you... Yes, I'm studying images of cats in party hats. Stay tuned...
What is ChatGPT doing ... and why does it work? From the lore of neural nets to what Aristotle didn't get to ... here's my version of the story: writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-i
Less hair, thinner monitor ... but the code still runs! Celebrating 35 years of Mathematica, building a taller and taller tower of technology, with thanks to our users & supporters. Many things ahead of their time 35 years ago still are... and there's so very very much more...
It's been the single longest-unfinished project of my life. But after 50 years I think I've now figured out the Second Law of thermodynamics ... and this is the story of how I got there:
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/a-50-y
How does the impressively human-like #ChatGPT get computational knowledge superpowers? Give it a Wolfram|Alpha neural implant!
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/01/wolfra
Just copied a notebook (on a floppy) from Mathematica V1 (1988) to V11 (2018) ... and it JUST WORKED! (And the code still runs!)
The explanation of ChatGPT that I wrote is now a printed book ... (hopefully) available in bookstores everywhere! And it's my thinnest book ever... (It's also an ebook)
amazon.com/What-ChatGPT-D
My work on the foundations of metamathematics is now a book---that's ready for preorder. All those pictures of metamathematical space (AKA slices of the ruliad) look pretty great in print!
amazon.com/Metamathematic
Join me for a livestreamed explanation of what we've figured out about fundamental physics ... followed by Q&A: 2pm ET today: + youtube.com/user/WolframRe #wolframphysics
The fact that I've been quiet on Twitter for the past couple of months is not a sign that I haven't been doing anything; actually it's a sign that I've been working more intensely than ever .... as a result of an unexpected science breakthrough I'm hoping to share soon...
A New Kind of Science (15th anniversary today) just became free, open, and high-res on the web! wolframscience.com/nks/
A sign of a project approaching completion: beginning to reshelve books...
They're out! All three of my pieces about the Second Law of thermodynamics are finally posted---all 451 pages of them. [Hmmm, I guess that's why they took a few months to write :) ]
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/comput
Something I did at the Wolfram Summer School: an off-the-cuff 90-minute lecture on the history of mathematics from before Babylon to now... wolfr.am/FEi4NGdf
#Mathematica is 32 today! Thank you to everyone who's helped on this journey. We're proud of how Mathematica has been used, how it has grown and how its development is still accelerating. Every year more multi-faceted :)
GIF
18 years later, I'm signing books again. The book is thinner (and so am I) ... more gray, more sun
wolfram-media.com/products/a-pro
Where did the Second Law of thermodynamics come from, and how did people decide it was true? It's a surprisingly tangled 150-year tale ... which I think I've now been able to untangle... writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/01/how-di
Those pictures in my new book A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics came out pretty nice!
I was given a book that Alan Turing owned ... and in it I found a piece of paper ... and there began a story ... with many stories within... wolfr.am/G8LuX45J
Getting ready to send off the ~800 page #WolframPhysics book to be printed. Just finished creating 3394 raw index entries [indexing is still a useful art, even if younger people don't always seem to notice that books have indices :) ]
amazon.com/Project-Find-F
Why is the Second Law of thermodynamics true (and is it always)? Now we can see it's a fascinating and surprising story of computational irreducibility, observer theory and more...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/comput
Is the concept of numbers inevitable? If aliens arrive in a starship, will they have numbers? Unraveling a surprising story of the foundations of physics, mathematics and human experience...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/05/how-in
What is ChatGPT doing...and why does it work? twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1
Excited to have officially launched the Wolfram Institute today. The dawn of a new way of getting science done...
wolframinstitute.org
#Mathematica30: Reprising a photo from 30 years ago and like Mathematica 1.0 I'm happy to report that I'm still working fine.
Just had a lot of fun exploring the simplest multiway (i.e. nondeterministic) Turing machines. As elsewhere in the computational universe, turns out they can do more than you'd ever imagine. (Oh, and they give me new intuition about quantum observers)
wolframphysics.org/bulletins/2021
Having been a remote CEO for 29 years ... I might have some tips about remote work ... so Ask Me Anything on Reddit, Monday, March 16th at 3 pm ET
After many years of computation and lots of output, the JHC function has sadly now halted. RIP John Conway (1937-2020)
wolframscience.com/nks/index/con-
Just finished a very full day of Wolfram Summer School final presentations ... and, since these are modern times, we liveminted an NFT to commemorate each presentation...
wolframblockchainlabs.com
Thanks to ideas from I'm now (50 yrs later) working on finishing a project I started in 1972: understanding/formalizing/generalizing the Second Law of Thermodynamics...
I never expected to have anything useful to say about "consciousness". But thanks to #WolframPhysics maybe now I do (and in addition to philosophical progress, there may be scientific & practical implications)
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/03/what-i
Maybe going faster than light is not a physical impossibility, but "just" a (perhaps irreducibly difficult) engineering problem. Exploring what our models say, complete with space tunnels, space demons and more...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/10/faster
Telling the story of how the Physics Project came to be:
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/how-we
Launching a new generation of programmers: Wolfram Programming Lab—for kids, adults, anyone! wolfr.am/9R7OsDBr
Frustrated tonight to find knowledge out of reach. I have some new ideas about economics and want to look at books about it. But 20 yrs ago, I put them on a top shelf, and now ladder access is blocked by furniture :(
The Project is one year old today---and things are going spectacularly! Not only do we seem to firmly be on the right track for fundamental physics, but our formalism also has immediate other applications...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/the-wo
How does the old idea of numbers work with the new idea of multicomputation? Remarkably basic math gives surprisingly complex behavior ... that relates to the foundations of physics and much more...
wolframphysics.org/bulletins/2021
Happy 27th birthday, Mathematica! So much invented, so much new ... but V1 code still runs! wolfr.am/1NgYZe9
In the middle of a very busy week ... chanced upon a picture that reminded me of simpler times ... and that enthusiasm has always been a thing for me...
Happy 33rd birthday, Mathematica ... so much built, so much opportunity to come
Delighted to announce the launch of the Research Affiliate and Junior Research Affiliate programs for the Wolfram Physics Project...
wolframphysics.org/people/
Celebrating 35 Years of Mathematica twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1
Figuring out what Euclid did ... 2300 years later. A spinoff to a spinoff of #WolframPhysics: introducing "empirical metamathematics" to learn about metamathematical space...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/09/the-em
Remembering my old friend Richard Feynman, who would have been 100 today: wolfr.am/ux6D8iSq
After 16 years ... a paperback! Though there's a certain irreducibility to the content...wolfr.am/zLBDuphn
Launching #WolframPhysics Project Bulletins: informal reports of progress (like the concept of the original scientific journal articles of the 1600s---reinterpreted for modern times) writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/05/event-
I'm always seeking the productive life ... now I'm posting some details of the personal infrastructure I've built to achieve it wolfr.am/ByreplpZ
Announcing Version 13.3 of Wolfram Language + Mathematica: LLM tech and a *lot* more...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/06/llm-te
Thinking about "Will AIs Take All Our Jobs and End Human History---or Not?" took me on quite a science-technology-philosophy journey...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/will-a
After 2000+ years, we now know the simplest possible axiom for logic: ((p.q).r).(p.((p.r).p))=r. But can we understand the proof?
wolfr.am/yVDMbvos
A major spinoff from our ... with potential to revolutionize quite a few fields. Introducing multicomputation as a 4th general paradigm for theoretical science. Very important, even if not easy to understand...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/09/even-b
Getting ready for some major exploration in the computational universe ... so added a few more cores to my home computer setup...
Time to cheer the world up with some physics? I'm getting close to announcing my new physics results ... capping several months of "I'd rather be phyzzing"...
Introducing The Ruliad---almost by definition the biggest object in metascience ... think of it as the limit of all accessible abstraction, encompassing all possible views of our universe, our mathematics, and more...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/11/the-co
Forty years ago I used to give physics seminars all the time. But after a very long gap ... I just gave one again yesterday at Harvard on the (unsurprising) topic of "A Surprisingly Promising Approach to the Fundamental Theory of Physics
I think I untangled the (fascinating) tale of Ada Lovelace! wolfr.am/8S5s42qI
Getting ready to give the opening keynote for the annual #WolframTechConf for the 31st time ... first time virtual....
Liveminted for NFT posterity some cellular automata plucked from the computational universe. Even after all these years it still amazes me what simple rules can produce... youtu.be/pMfrRFNCKhE?t=
So exciting to see how quickly things are moving with #WolframPhysics... Makes me think of quantum mechanics circa 1925. It's taken me 2 weeks just to summarize part of what got done at our Summer School ...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/07/a-burs
It's 20 years... and I'm happy to report, from the simplest rules to the whole universe, the process of discovery is still my very favorite thing!
It's a 1,3 time ... Mathematica is 1/3 century old, and today, on the 13th, we'll be releasing Version 13 of Wolfram Language + Mathematica...
In 1921 Emil Post thought he could "solve all of mathematics" if only he could solve the "problem of tag". But after spending months, he gave up. With computers and a century more of ideas, I just decided to take another crack at it
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/03/after-
Celebrating a third of a century of Mathematica, and looking forward...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/10/celebr
Wolfram Language / Mathematica 12.1.1 released today ... after a big polishing push that fixed more than 1000 reported bugs...
Beyond #blockchain: getting global consensus from local rules ... a most interesting algorithmic problem!
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/05/the-pr
A big surprise in the outer reaches of abstraction: introducing the physicalization of metamathematics. Thanks to we have a major new direction in the foundations of mathematics...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2022/03/the-ph
Are All Fish the Same Shape If You Stretch Them? The Victorian Tale of "On Growth and Form" wolfr.am/pFWfK0ik
Had fun talking about artificial general intelligence at MIT; lots of good questions
youtu.be/P7kX7BuHSFI
On my birthday a year ago today I said I was finally going to restart my big project in physics. I did ... and it's working out great!! So today I'm inspired to think about other big projects I've always hoped to do... youtube.com/watch?v=2-aAi6 writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/how-we
Glad to see the who taught my 1977 class on general relativity won a Nobel Prize this week ... Now I'm not sure I agree with the first thing he said .... and I should have thought to ask what if p, q tensor indices aren't integers...
Just finished our 21st annual Wolfram Summer School: 3 weeks of extreme professoring for me and 66 almost-thesis-scope projects by 66 students from 28 countries around the world
wolframcloud.com/obj/microsites
Hello, Wolfram Institute! Launching in less than a month ... with some incredible science+ coming over the horizon....
Another episode in our continuing LLM story... Introducing LLM functions: a powerful new form of programming made possible by Wolfram Language + LLMs. writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/05/the-ne
Tomorrow is the 35th anniversary of the original launch of Mathematica. Join me at 1 pm ET for a look to the future ... and a real-time test of whether we maintained compatibility over these 35 years...
Exploring black holes and other much more exotic phenomena in spacetime in #WolframPhysics models...
Put together enough buzzwords and maybe something will happen ... hatching the Easter egg of Quantum Neural Blockchain AI... wolfr.am/tjzLaapC
Exactly 10 years ago now I'd just pressed the button to make Wolfram|Alpha live (and it was all livestreamed)... wolfr.am/DATPRkuX
Before Turing machines, before even Gödel's theorem, there were combinators ... and they did universal computation ... way ahead of their time. Getting ready to celebrate their centenary ... and chart their future...
Now that I finally feel I'm beginning to understand multiway Turing machines and quantum mechanics ... I just discovered something in my archives: 39 years ago (in 1982) I was asked to review a foundational paper on quantum Turing machines. Here's my report:
From a livestream today analyzing pandemic data ... there at least seems to be an encouraging trend if one averages daily case ratios over countries...
wolframcloud.com/obj/s.wolfram/
About to publish: "Combinators: A Centennial View "... the result of my burst of scientific & historical research on a subject I've very long been curious about ... and that's turning out to have some quite unexpected implications amazon.com/dp/1579550436
A little project for the holidays, that turned out not to be so little: telling the story of our Spikey (aka rhombic hexecontahedron), a tale of math, physics, folk art & more...wolfr.am/AcSCPxM7
Livestreamed nearly 3 hrs of applied philosophy yesterday---working through classic issues in ontology and linguistic philosophy so we can actually make code...
Bringing together physics, math & computation theory with blockchain May 26 for a 1-day research-meets-tech conference (with ) about Distributed Consensus with Cellular Automata & Related Systems.
wolfram.com/events/distrib
Excited to announce the release today of Wolfram Language + Mathematica 12.2. 228 new functions! Our largest ever .1 release! (Breaking even our 12.1 record from March 2020!) Great work, team! Enjoy all the new features, everyone!
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/12/launch
Happy to see this conversation continuing ; look forward to chatting again. (Challenge is not just to open up data transport, but to open up defining the AI behavior users want)
New today: Instant plugins for ChatGPT---introducing the Wolfram ChatGPT Plugin Kit. More to come soon...
writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/04/instan
Given computational superpowers (AKA #WolframLanguage) it's rather amazing what high-school students can do in 2 weeks ... as shown in the projects from our High School Summer Program
wolframcloud.com/obj/microsites
Lots of interesting discussions and ideas at our conference today (with NKN) on "Distributed Consensus with Cellular Automata & Other Systems"
youtu.be/cS4u-VpmC98
GIF
I think it's time for someone to do a little debugging... I wonder what aspect of my 14-year rather limited use of made me seem like not me... Or, maybe, flatteringly enough, a new me... :)
Third edition of An Elementary Introduction to Wolfram Language is now published! Using computational language to teach everyone how to formalize their thoughts computationally. Now more accessible---and important---than ever, thanks to LLMs. wolfram.com/language/eleme
Remembering Cormac McCarthy, the only other person who came to all the MacArthur get-togethers since 1982; those late-night discussions were always such a pleasure, winding through so many topics, particularly our shared interest in the trajectories of people's lives.
