Stephen Wolfram

You know, what what causes that and you know

read the book, and the book actually, one of the things that was really significant to me about that was the book kind of claimed, although I didn't really understand what it said in detail, it kind of claimed that this sort of principle of physics was derivable somehow.

And other things I'd learned about physics, it was all like, it's a fact that energy is conserved.

It's a fact that relativity works or something.

Not it's something you can derive from some fundamental sort of, it has to be that way as a matter of kind of mathematics or logic or something.

So it was sort of interesting to me that there was a thing about physics that was kind of inevitably true and derivable, so to speak.

And so I think that, so then I was like, there's a picture on this book, and I was trying to understand it.

And so that was actually the first serious program that I wrote for a computer was probably 1973, written for this computer the size of a desk program with paper tape and so on.

And I tried to reproduce this picture on the book, and it didn't succeed.

It didn't look like, okay, so what happened is,

Okay, many years later, I learned how the picture on the book was actually made and that it was actually kind of a fake.

But I didn't know that at that time.

And that picture was actually a very high-tech thing when it was made in the beginning of the 1960s.

It was made on the largest supercomputer that existed at the time.

And even so, it couldn't quite simulate the thing that it was supposed to be simulating.

But anyway, I didn't know that until many, many, many years later.

So at the time, it was like you have these balls bouncing around in this box.

But I was using this computer with eight kilowords of memory.

They were 18-bit words, memory words, okay?

So it was, whatever, 24 kilobytes of memory.