Stephen Wolfram

Near the end of his life, he was like, well, now I'm going to experiment with all kinds of drugs because I'm dying anyway, more or less.

I think he was a little embarrassed about that.

In the environment of the time, these were illegal drugs and so on.

I think he viewed himself as a think-for-yourself but nevertheless law-abiding citizen.

I don't think he felt that he was having brilliant insights rushing in because he was in some altered state.

One of the things he said to me was, if you want to do creative science, peace of mind is an essential feature.

There wasn't a field called nanotechnology when Dick Feynman was thinking about nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology was something nobody talked about.

He just was thinking about it, and he thought it was interesting, and he tried to think through what the implications of that would be.

I think some of his best work was actually done in these corners where nobody else had gone and where he just said, well, I wonder how that works.

I mean, look, he was disdainful of all of these honorific types of things.

I'm Stephen Wolfram, and I do science and technology

He was, I mean, I would probably go further than him and say any field for which there is a prize that's defined is a field that already has had its best days behind it.

It's a field that barely has a name that's going to have the most fertile moment.

I happened to get one of these MacArthur Awards in the very first batch of those things.

Feynman took me aside and said, look, just don't make this mean that you think people have big expectations for you.

He was almost like prizes are a damaging thing to people, particularly early in their careers.

Stephen Wolfram.

His distaste for social science came from the fact that it just is not a bedrock kind of field.

I'm sure if he was talking about that or about economics or something like that, he would say, what is this?