Stephen Wolfram

In the laws of thermodynamics, the first law is basically the law of energy conservation, that the total energy associated with heat plus the total energy associated with mechanical kinds of things plus other kinds of energy, that that total is constant.

And that became a pretty well understood principle.

But the second law of thermodynamics was always mysterious.

Like, why does it work this way?

Can it be derived from underlying mechanical laws?

And so when I was, well, 12 years old, actually, I had gotten interested.

Well, I'd been interested in space and things like that because I thought that was kind of the future and interesting sort of technology and so on.

And for a while, kind of, you know, every deep space probe was sort of a personal friend type thing.

I knew all kinds of characteristics of it and was kind of writing up all these things when I was younger.

I don't know, 8, 9, 10 years old and so on.

And then I got interested from being interested in spacecraft.

I got interested in how do they work, what are all the instruments on them and so on.

And that got me interested in physics, which was just as well because if I'd stayed interested in space in the mid to late 1960s, I would have had a long wait before space really blossomed as an area.

Admin is everything.

Right.

I got interested in physics.

And then, well, the actual sort of detailed story is when I kind of graduated from elementary school at age 12.

That's the time in England where you finish elementary school.

My gift, sort of, I suppose, more or less for myself was I got this collection of...

Physics books which was some college physics course of college physics books and volume five about statistical physics It has this picture on the cover that shows a bunch of kind of idealized molecules Sitting in one side of a box and then it has a series of frames Showing how these molecules sort of spread out in the box and I thought that's pretty interesting.