Stephen Wolfram

We're at, I don't know what it is, fourth generation, I don't know fifth generation, I don't know what generation it is of physicists.

And I was one of these, so to speak.

And for me, the foundations were like the pyramids, so to speak.

It was that way and it was always that way.

It is difficult in an old field to go back to the foundations and think about rewriting them.

It's a lot easier in young fields where you're still dealing with the first generation of people who invented the field.

And it tends to be the case, you know, that the nature of what happens in science tends to be, you know, you'll get, typically the pattern is some methodological advance occurs.

And then there's a period of five years, 10 years, maybe a little bit longer than that, where there's lots of things that are now made possible by that methodological advance, whether it's, you know,

I don't know, telescopes or whether that's some mathematical method or something.

Something happens, a tool gets built, and then you can do a bunch of stuff.

And there's a bunch of low-hanging fruit to be picked.

And that takes a certain amount of time.

After all that low-hanging fruit is picked, then it's a hard slog for the next however many decades or century or more to get to the next sort of level at which one can do something.

And it tends to be the case that in fields that are in that kind of, I wouldn't say cruise mode because it's really hard work, but it's very hard work for very incremental progress.

Do you have any memories of Richard?

We worked together quite a bit, actually.

um in fact on um and in fact both when i was at caltech and after i left caltech we were both um consultants at this company called thinking machines corporation which was just down the street from here actually um as ultimately ill-fated company but um i used to say this company is not going to work with the strategy they have and dick feinman always used to say what do we know about running companies just let them run their company but uh anyway

He was not into that kind of thing.

And he always thought that my interest in doing things like running companies was a distraction, so to speak.

And for me, it's a mechanism to have a more effective machine for actually getting things, figuring things out and getting things to happen.