A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics
The book-length treatment of the project.
What it covers (catalogued)
A 778-page, heavily illustrated exposition gathering the 2020 announcement material (and more) into book form. Notably, it reprints the fundamental-physics chapter from A New Kind of Science (2002) as its foundation, making the lineage from NKS to the Physics Project explicit.
Distillation status: catalogued (we have not worked through the print book). The freely available 2020 announcement essay covers most of the same conceptual ground.
Relationship to A New Kind of Science (2002)
The Physics Project is a direct continuation of NKS’s core idea — that extremely simple rules can produce arbitrarily rich behaviour. Wolfram states he had “been working towards this for nearly 50 years” and devoted ~100 pages of NKS to fundamental physics; the project sharpens those network / cellular-automaton ideas into hypergraph rewriting, causal graphs, and multiway systems.
Grounded facts we can safely state
- A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics, Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Media, 2020 (778 pp.).
- It reprints the fundamental-physics chapter of A New Kind of Science (2002), making the NKS lineage explicit.
Supports concept pages
Project overview · relationship to A New Kind of Science · history & motivation.