It’s pretty easy to see how three-dimensional space might arise from Wolfram Physics.

The hypergraph kinda looks like space, and, for some rules, it kinda looks like it’s three-dimensional.

But our universe isn’t just empty three-dimensional space.

It’s mostly empty space, but there are also particles moving through that space: photons, neutrinos, electrons, quarks.

Sometimes, these particles interact, annihilating each other and producing new particles.

If Wolfram Physics is to be a successful model of our universe, it must, of course, model these elementary particles and their interactions.

So where are the particles in the hypergraph?

What is a particle in Wolfram’s universe?

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Animations:

• Thanks to Alan Dewar for permission to use his excellent implementation of Conway’s Game of Life for many of the animations in the video
• Thanks also to Chris Rowett for permission to use his Life Viewer, a beautiful implementation of Conway’s Game of Life, which I used for the greyship animation in the video and image in the thumbnail
• Another implementation of Conway’s Game of Life, which reproduces the Life Lexicon from ConwayLife.com, is at playgameoflife.com

Sources:

• Talking of ConwayLife.com, that’s another incredible resource for information on Conway’s Game of Life

Tools:

• I created an RLE to text converter to convert Run Length Encoded patterns to plain text format

Images:

• John H Conway 2005 by Thane Plambeck licensed under CC BY 2.0

Sounds:

• Crickets choir by Serg Childed licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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