[sblom]

Stephen Wolfram has really grown on me over the last 10 years or so. He came across as obnoxiously arrogant for the longest time (so much that I still (defensibly) refer to "A New Kind of Science" as "Stephen Wolfram is a MF'n Genius Even If He Does Say So Himself").

These days, he live streams Mathematica design reviews on YouTube and Twitch. The conversations are fairly balanced and he clearly has a decent eye for designing the best god damn computational notebook system on the planet.

Admittedly, campaigning to name what could possibly maybe someday be the next big upgrade to physics after himself ("the Wolfram Physics Project") while he's still around and it's still in development is MIGHTY BOLD. But there's some really really interesting outcomes from the work that they've done so far.

If nothing else, it's a slam dunk proof of how physicists already think of "the speed of light" as actually "the speed limit for causal interaction". You essentially get all of the implications of both special and general relativity out of modeling causal interactions without even attaching it to any sort of specific physics.

I love that he wrote this essay (typical Wolfram long form essay that takes multiple sittings for me to digest) using puzzles and games as the subject of aforementioned causal modeling. Super fun, and also insightful!