Stephen Wolfram

So how could it not be?

It could not be, so a Turing machine essentially deals with integers, whole numbers at some level.

And it can do things like it can add one to a number.

It can do things like this.

And it can also store whatever the heck it did.

Yes, it has an infinite storage.

But when one thinks about doing physics,

or sort of idealized physics or idealized mathematics, one can deal with real numbers, numbers with an infinite number of digits, numbers which are absolutely precise, and one can say, we can take this number and we can multiply it by itself.

Do you think infinity plays a part?

I think that the role of infinity is complicated.

Infinity is useful in conceptualizing things.

It's not actualizable.

Almost by definition, it's not actualizable.

But do you think infinity is part of the thing that might underlie the laws of physics?

I think that no.

I think there are many questions that you ask about, you might ask about physics, which inevitably involve infinity.

Like when you say, you know, is faster-than-light travel possible?

You could say, given the laws of physics, can you make something even arbitrarily large, even, quote, infinitely large, that will make faster-than-light travel possible?

Then you're thrown into dealing with infinity as a kind of theoretical question.

But I mean, talking about what's underneath space and time and how one can make a computational infrastructure...