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https://youtu.be/y-jn13jkhnY

VIDEO EXCERPTS: I'm speaking with Stephan Wolfram, the distinguished physicist, computer scientist, and software entrepreneur. We're discussing in depth the Wolfram Physics Project. Steven's grand, indeed radical vision of a new kind of science in which computation via simple rules is the foundation of physical reality. This now is part six...

[...] And the way we realize to think about space is as it having a structure that is this giant hypergraph of atoms of space that are related to each other. That's kind of the substrate of the universe. Time is then the progressive rewriting of this hypergraph by computational processes.

[...] "How did the universe start?" is a question we can ask. As we perceive it today, the universe is roughly three-dimensional so far as we know. Our guess is that this giant kind of network of atoms of space was infinitely dimensional at the beginning of the universe. So that means that the universe gradually cooled down to be roughly three-dimensional.

We kind of suspect that there may be dimension fluctuations left over from the early universe and that somewhere in the universe there may be space that's effectively, let's say 3.01-dimensional or 2.99-dimensional. And this is one of the things that we think it might be possible to actually detect by astrophysical experiments the presence of those kinds of dimension fluctuations.

This is the idea that the universe doesn't have a fixed dimension -- that the dimension of the universe can change over time -- is a very unexpected idea that comes out of our physics project. It also happens to resolve some questions that I worked on a very long time ago in the 1970s on the beginnings of what became the inflationary universe scenario.

Which I've never been a big fan of, that tried to explain how it is that the universe is as uniform as it is. Because light signals shouldn't have been able to cross the universe in the time that was available. But if the universe starts with infinite dimensions, there is no such issue because in infinite-dimensional space everything is infinitely close to everything else.

And so there isn't the same issue of you having to go through space at just the speed of light, because everything effectively is right there and immediately connected to itself.

So does that obviate the need for cosmic inflation to explain the uniformity?

Yes, that is gone.

So the next issue that comes up is in the traditional view where you separate quantum mechanics from general relativity. You end up with this situation where there is a structure of space and...

What is time in the Wolfram Physics Project? ... https://youtu.be/y-jn13jkhnY

That Time is essentially computational is a provocative metaphor, but we should be wary of reifying computation as some sort of non-substrate process that is going on on its own. All computation in our own experience only ever happens thru the electron circuitry of computers themselves. It definitely does have a substrate in the interactions of the structured atoms themselves. It isn't some magical property that just happens on its own independent of everything else. No more than life is some sort of mysterious property separate from the chemical reactions inside of a living organisms.

I particularly enjoyed Wolfram's take on computational reality. It mirrors the very ideas I proposed in higher states of consciousness.

The idea that there is more to reality than meets the eye is an oversimplification of perspectives. However, like the great Max Planck at the turn of last century, Physics calls for greater attention to detail.