Physics as Automata

Fascinating read.    And as a person with background in physics and computer science I find this fascinating.   Have read parts of Wolfram's 'big' book, which initially posed aspects of this solution.  Admit to being somewhat mysttified by the solution and what to do with it.   Technical, the article is a good start.

Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics…
and It’s Beautiful

Website: Wolfram Physics Project

Technical Intro: A Class of Models with the Potential to Represent Fundamental Physics
How We Got Here: The Backstory of the Wolfram Physics Project
Visual summary of the Wolfram Physics Project

I Never Expected This
It’s unexpected, surprising—and for me incredibly exciting. To be fair, at some level I’ve been working towards this for nearly 50 years. But it’s just in the last few months that it’s finally come together. And it’s much more wonderful, and beautiful, than I’d ever imagined.

In many ways it’s the ultimate question in natural science: How does our universe work? Is there a fundamental theory? An incredible amount has been figured out about physics over the past few hundred years. But even with everything that’s been done—and it’s very impressive—we still, after all this time, don’t have a truly fundamental theory of physics.

Back when I used do theoretical physics for a living, I must admit I didn’t think much about trying to find a fundamental theory; I was more concerned about what we could figure out based on the theories we had. And somehow I think I imagined that if there was a fundamental theory, it would inevitably be very complicated.

But in the early 1980s, when I started studying the computational universe of simple programs I made what was for me a very surprising and important discovery: that even when the underlying rules for a system are extremely simple, the behavior of the system as a whole can be essentially arbitrarily rich and complex.

And this got me thinking: Could the universe work this way? Could it in fact be that underneath all of this richness and complexity we see in physics there are just simple rules? I soon realized that if that was going to be the case, we’d in effect have to go underneath space and time and basically everything we know. Our rules would have to operate at some lower level, and all of physics would just have to emerge. ...."