Suddenly There’s Just So Much New Science to Do

Something remarkable has happened these past two years. For 45 years I’ve devoted myself to building a taller and taller tower of science and technology—which along the way has delivered many outputs of which I’m quite proud. But starting in 2020 with the unexpected breakthroughs of our Wolfram Physics Project we’ve jumped to a whole new level. And suddenly—yes, building on our multi-decade tower—it seems as if we’ve found a new paradigm that’s incredibly powerful, and that’s going to let us tackle an almost absurd range of longstanding questions in all sorts of areas of science.

Developing a fundamental theory of physics is certainly an ambitious place to start, and I’m happy to say that things seem to be going quite excellently there, not least in providing new foundations for many existing results and initiatives in physics. But the amazing (and to me very unexpected) thing is that we can take our new paradigm and also apply it to a huge range of other areas. Just a couple of weeks ago I published a 250-page treatise about its application to the “physicalization of metamathematics”—and to providing a very new view of the foundations of mathematics (with implications both for the question of what mathematics really is, and for the practical long-term future of mathematics). Continue reading