In preparing my keynote at our 31st annual technology conference, I tried to collect some of my thoughts about our long-term mission and how I view the opportunities it is creating…

What I’ve Spent My Life On

I’ve been fortunate to live at a time in history when there’s a transformational intellectual development: the rise of computation and the computational paradigm. And I’ve devoted my adult life to doing what I can to make computation and the computational method achieve their potential, both intellectually and in the world at large. I’ve alternated (about five times so far) between doing this with basic science and with practical technology, each time building on what I’ve been able to do before.

The basic science has shown me the immense power and potential of what’s out there in the computational universe: the capability of even simple programs to generate behavior of immense complexity, including, I now believe, the fundamental physics of our whole universe. But how can we humans harness all that power and potential? How do we use the computational universe to achieve things we want: to take our human objectives and automate achieving them?

I’ve now spent four decades in an effort to build a bridge between what’s possible with computation, and what we humans care about and think about. It’s a story of technology, but it’s also a story of big and deep ideas. And the result has been the creation of the first and only full-scale computational language—that we now call the Wolfram Language. Continue reading

When the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program asked me to keynote their annual conference I thought it would be a good excuse to spend some time on a question I’ve always wanted to explore…

Can You Build a Warp Drive?

“So you think you have a fundamental theory of physics. Well, then tell us if warp drive is possible!” Despite the hopes and assumptions of science fiction, real physics has for at least a century almost universally assumed that no genuine effect can ever propagate through physical space any faster than light. But is this actually true? We’re now in a position to analyze this in the context of our model for fundamental physics. And I’ll say at the outset that it’s a subtle and complicated question, and I don’t know the full answer yet.

But I increasingly suspect that going faster than light is not a physical impossibility; instead, in a sense, doing it is “just” an engineering problem. But it may well be an irreducibly hard engineering problem. And one that can’t be solved with the computational resources available to us in our universe. But it’s also conceivable that there may be some clever “engineering solution”, as there have been to so many seemingly insuperable engineering problems in the past. And that in fact there is a way to “move through space” faster than light. Continue reading