Stephen Wolfram

You get, because I've done this poll informally at least, it's curious actually, you get a decent fraction of people saying, oh yeah, that would be pretty interesting.

Right.

I mean, I think that's somewhat true.

And in fact, in this project that I'm launching into to try and find the fundamental theory of physics, I'm going to do it as a very public project.

I mean, it's going to be live streamed and all this kind of stuff.

I don't know what will happen.

It'll be kind of fun.

I mean, I think that it's the interface to the world of this project.

I mean, I figure...

One feature of this project is, you know, unlike technology projects that basically are what they are, this is a project that might simply fail because it might be the case that it generates all kinds of elegant mathematics that has absolutely nothing to do with the physical universe that we happen to live in.

Well, okay, so we're talking about...

kind of the quest to find the fundamental theory of physics.

First point is, it's turned out it's kind of hard to find the fundamental theory of physics.

People weren't sure that that would be the case.

Back in the early days of applying mathematics to science, 1600s and so on, people were like, oh, in 100 years, we'll know everything there is to know about how the universe works.

Turned out to be harder than that.

And people got kind of humble at some level because every time we got to sort of a greater level of smallness in studying the universe, it seemed like the math got more complicated and everything got harder.

When I was a kid, basically, I started doing particle physics.

And when I was doing particle physics, I always thought finding the fundamental, fundamental theory of physics, that's a kooky business.

We'll never be able to do that.