Stephen Wolfram

Now, you know, is it right?

I don't know yet.

It's awfully suggestive.

If it isn't right, then the designer of the universe should feel embarrassed, so to speak, because it's a really good way to do it.

That's a little bit of a complicated question, because when you're dealing with these things that involve these rewrites that have... Even randomness is an emergent phenomenon, perhaps.

Yes.

I mean, it's a... Yeah, well, randomness, in many of these systems...

pseudo-randomness and randomness are hard to distinguish.

In this particular case, the current idea that we have about measurement in quantum mechanics is something very bizarre and very abstract, and I don't think I can yet explain it without yakking about very technical things.

Eventually, I will be able to.

But if that's right,

it's a weird thing because it slices between determinism and randomness in a weird way that hasn't been sliced before, so to speak.

So like many of these questions that come up in science, where it's like, is it this or is it that?

Turns out the real answer is it's neither of those things.

It's something kind of different and sort of orthogonal to those categories.

And so that's the current, this week's idea about how that might work.

But we'll see how that unfolds.

I mean, there's this question about a field like physics and sort of the quest for fundamental theory and so on.

And there's both the science of what happens and there's the sort of the social aspect of what happens.

Because in a field that is basically as old as physics,