155 | Stephen Wolfram on Computation, Hypergraphs, and Fundamental Physics (opens in new tab)

It's not easy, figuring out the fundamental laws of physics. It's even harder when your chosen methodology is to essentially start from scratch, positing a simple underlying system and a simple set of rules for it, and hope that everything we know about the world somehow pops out. That's the project being undertaken by Stephen Wolfram and his collaborators, who are working with a kind of discrete system called "hypergraphs." We talk about what the basic ideas are, why one would choose this pa...