Stephen Wolfram

But we can operate within these frameworks that we built for doing quantum field theory and general relativity and things like this, and it's all good and we can figure out a lot of stuff.

Did you even at that time have a sense that there's something behind that too?

Sure, I just didn't expect that.

I thought in some rather un... It's actually kind of crazy, thinking back on it, because it's kind of like there was this long period in civilization where people thought the ancients had it all figured out and will never figure out anything new.

And to some extent, that's the way I felt about physics when I was in the middle of doing it, so to speak.

It was, you know, we've got quantum field theory.

It's the foundation of what we're doing.

And yes, there's probably something underneath this, but we'll sort of never figure it out.

But then I started studying simple programs in the computational universe, things like cellular automata and so on.

And I discovered that they do all kinds of things that were completely at odds with the intuition that I had had.

And so after that, after you see this tiny little program that does all this amazingly complicated stuff, then you start feeling a bit more ambitious about physics and saying, maybe we could do this for physics too.

And so that got me started years ago now in this kind of idea of could we actually find what's underneath all of these frameworks like quantum field theory and general relativity and so on.

And people perhaps don't realize as clearly as they might that the frameworks we're using for physics, which is basically these two things, quantum field theory, sort of the theory of small stuff and general relativity, theory of gravitation and large stuff.

Those are the two basic theories, and they're 100 years old.

I mean, general relativity was 1915, quantum field theory, well, 1920s.

So basically 100 years old.

And it's been a good run.

There's a lot of stuff been figured out.

But what's interesting is the foundations haven't changed in all that period of time.

even though the foundations had changed several times before that in the 200 years earlier than that.