Here’s the second excerpt 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?

Enjoy!

Mark

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