Stephen Wolfram

And so I had kind of arguments, oh, I'm going to ignore that case because whatever.

Yeah, I think that's an interesting question.

I've wondered about that myself because it's kind of like, you know, you live through these things and then you say, what was the historical story?

And sometimes the historical story that you realize after the fact was not what you lived through, so to speak.

And so, you know, what I realized is I think what happened is, you know, I did physics kind of like reductionistic physics where you're thrown in the universe and you're told, go figure out what's going on inside it.

And then I started building computer tools and I started building my first computer language, for example.

And computer language is not like, it's sort of like physics in the sense that you have to take all those computations people want to do and kind of drill down and find the primitives that they can all be made of.

But then you do something that's really different because you're just saying, okay, these are the primitives.

Now, you know, hopefully they'll be useful to people.

Let's build up from there.

So you're essentially building an artificial universe in a sense where you make this language.

You've got these primitives.

You're just building whatever you feel like building.

And so it was sort of interesting for me because from doing science where you're just throwing the universe as the universe is to then just being told, you know, you can make up any universe you want.

And so I think that experience of making a computer language, which is essentially building your own universe, so to speak, that's what gave me a somewhat different attitude towards what might be possible.

It's like, let's just explore what can be done in these artificial universes rather than thinking the natural science way of let's be constrained by how the universe actually is.

Right.

Well, it's a telescope or it's a tool.

It lets you see stuff.

The computer is more general than the telescope.