In the early days of the Wolfram Physics Project, Stephen Wolfram seemed to be seeking a single rule that, when applied to the hypergraph, could generate our universe.

More recently, however, Wolfram has promoted the idea of the ruliad, the application of every possible rule to the hypergraph.

So I asked Jonathan Gorard, who was instrumental in the founding of the Wolfram Physics Project, whether all rules might be applied to generate our universe, or whether he was searching for one rule to rule them all.

—

Stephen Wolfram’s 2010 TED talk in which he said he was committed “to see if within this decade we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe”.

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

Concepts mentioned by Jonathan

• Equivalence class
• Congruence class
• Lagrangian mechanics
• Hamiltonian mechanics
• Teleology
• Ontology
• Axiomatic view of mathematics – top-down
• Constructivist view of mathematics – bottom-up
• Domain of discourse
• Intuitionism
• Algorithmic information theory

Image

• Stele from Retortillo by Emilio Gómez Fernández licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

—

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