Stephen Wolfram

You know, there are all kinds of processes going on in physics.

Only a limited set of those are ones that we capture and use for technology because they're only a limited set where we say, you know, this is a thing that we can sort of apply to the human purposes we currently care about.

I mean, you might have said, okay, you pick up a piece of rock.

You say, okay, there's a nice silicate.

It contains all kinds of silicon.

I don't care.

Then you realize, oh, we could actually turn this into a semiconductor wafer and make a microprocessor out of it.

And then we care a lot about it.

And it's this thing about what do we, in the evolution of our civilization, what things do we identify as being things we care about?

I mean, it's like when there was a little announcement recently of the possibility of a high-temperature superconductor that involved the element lutetium.

which generally nobody has cared about.

But suddenly, if there's this application that relates to human purposes, we start to care a lot.

Oh, definitely.

I mean, the fact is, look, logic is but the first step.

There are many other kinds of calculi about things that we consider, you know, about sort of things that happen in the world or things that are meaningful.

You know what I mean?

Well, because we can plainly see that their thing... I mean, if you say, here's a sentence that is syntactically correct, okay?

You look at it and you're like, you know, the happy electron, you know, eight...

I don't know what, something that it just, you look at it and it's like, this is meaningless.

It's just a bunch of words.