Episode Details
Back to EpisodesBlack holes in the hypergraph with Stephen Wolfram
Description
Electrons may be tiny black holes propagating through the hypergraph.
After all, electrons and black holes have much in common: they’re carriers of pure motion, they’re all the same – from the outside, at least – and we don’t know what’s going on inside them.
Just as black holes may cloak the remants of collapsed civilizations, so electrons may hold secret histories of their paths through the universe.
Stephen Wolfram takes this idea further. If particles, such as electrons, are the carriers of pure motion in physical space, what are the carriers of pure motion in branchial space and rulial space? Maybe, in rulial space, it’s the discrete concepts we use to communicate ideas from one mind to another.
These are fascinating speculations, but Stephen insists that we need not know what a particle is to make progress with his framework. We can understand energy without knowing what a particle is; we can understand momentum without knowing what a particle is; maybe we can even derive Quantum Field Theory from the Wolfram model without ever knowing what a particle is.
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Stephen Wolfram
References
- Black holes
- Black hole mergers
- Kuratowski’s theorem
- Wagner’s theorem
- Conway’s Game of Life resources include Alan Dewar’s implementation, Chris Rowett’s Life Viewer, playgameoflife.com and ConwayLife.com
- Energy is the flux of causal edges through spacelike hypersurfaces
- Causal graph
- Quantum electrodynamics
- Quantum chromodynamics
- The Standard Model
- Richard Feynman
- Feynman diagram
- Quantum Field Theory
- S-matrix or scattering matrix
- Virtual particles
- Brancial space
- Rulial space
- Computational irreducibility
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