Stephen Wolfram

So what is space?

It's a kind of a question one might ask.

Back in the early days of quantum mechanics, for example, people said, oh, for sure, space is going to be discrete because all these other things we're finding are discrete.

But that never worked out in physics.

And so space and physics today is always treated as this continuous thing, just like Euclid imagined it.

I mean, the very first thing Euclid says in his sort of common notions is, you know, a point is something which has no part.

In other words, there are points that are arbitrarily small, and there's a continuum of possible positions of points.

And the question is, is that true?

And so, for example, if we look at, I don't know, a fluid like air or water, we might say, oh, it's a continuous fluid.

We can pour it.

We can do all kinds of things continuously.

But actually, we know, because we know the physics of it, that it consists of a bunch of discrete molecules bouncing around, and only in the aggregate

Is it behaving like a continuum?

And so the possibility exists that that's true of space too.

People haven't managed to make that work with existing frameworks in physics.

But I've been interested in whether one can imagine that underneath space and also underneath time is something more structureless.

And the question is, is it computational?

So there are a couple of possibilities.

It could be computational, somehow fundamentally equivalent to a Turing machine.

Or it could be fundamentally not.