History of Science & Technology Q&A (June 17, 2026)

**Stephen Wolfram** (0:01)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Q&A about History of Science & Technology. And I see a number of questions saved up here.
Um, let's see. Julia asks, do you think there have been scientific discoveries in human history that were genuinely correct, but disappeared because civilization lacked the intellectual ecosystem to recognize their importance? The answer is surely and definitively yes, on both small scales and larger scales. People have, um, whether it's, oh, I don't know, one that immediately comes to mind is things in medicine, where people kind of said at some point in the past, oh, all these systems are kind of integrated together, and that's sort of the whole person thing that you have to look at for some purpose in medicine. And then people said, no, no, no, we're going to sciencify this, and we're going to figure out how to do sort of reductionistic science, and we're going to break it down into, you know, diseases of this particular, you know, a blood vessel and diseases of that and so on. And not, and kind of ignore the fact that there's sort of a bigger systems kind of thing going on. And I think that's something where people sort of haven't, didn't quite have that the paradigm, medicine in antiquity was much more of an integrative kind of discussion than in the post-scientific revolution 1600s type period. This more, let's do the reductionistic thing, let's look at the micro pieces and so on, became much more the thing. Sort of realizing how kind of complex systems like us get put together, which we're only just starting to really have any kind of serious sort of foundational scientific understanding of, something I've been working on quite a bit. That's the, but nevertheless, there are sort of ideas that emerge every so often, whether it's the gut brain axis or these other kinds of things, where actually turns out the pieces fit together in much more elaborate detail than was understood on the basis of kind of reductionistic science. Exactly what the right methodology to think about that is something which I think still remains for the future, but it's something where people sort of had the right idea back in the day, and it got kind of crushed by kind of the reductionistic science approach. And so that's one example of that. I would say that in, well, for example, in the idea of computation, the kind of idea of abstract computation, people were kind of nipping at that in the 1600s quite a bit. People like Leibniz, people who were working on these sort of philosophical languages for trying to describe things about the world in an abstract way and so on. There was sort of a lot of nipping at those kinds of things. But yet, the sort of whole conceptual framework that eventually led to the idea of computation just didn't exist at that time. I mean, the chain that was required to have it exist was in retrospect, it looks like a lot of it wasn't necessary, but it sort of had to happen historically, I think, to get there. And that involved things like the idea of a mathematical function. The idea that you could say, first of all, people said, oh, first of all, I had to invent algebra.
You had to have things like, there's this thing, it's x squared, and for any x, you're computing x squared. But then there's the idea of that is just a function that goes from x to x squared, and you could pick up that function f, and have it be this abstract thing on its own that you can start talking about. That's really a thing that only became clear in the late 1800s. That's the thing that you needed to have, this idea of playing with functions in their own right, not with the actual raw material of x squareds and things like this. That I think was necessary for the invention of the idea of computation, and this idea that you could do things where you essentially are creating functions, where you're having data that turns into code, which is the key idea that leads one to universal computation. But to have that idea, you had to have the idea that you could have functions disembodied in some way, and that required that whole chain of things to happen.
That's another case. I think there are plenty of cases where there's so much belief about how things work that one ignores other possibilities. I'll give you an example that I've been much involved with, which is the idea of, is the universe fundamentally computational? Is it fundamentally made of discrete elements that follow discrete rules or not? Well, what happened was people didn't know what the universe was made of for a long time, and then the 1600s came along, and folks like Galileo and Newton came along and said, look, we can use mathematics and eventually things like calculus to explain, to miraculously explain lots of seemingly hard to understand phenomena about the universe, about the motion of planets and comets and things like this, and many other kinds of things. And so that got to the point a few hundred years later where people said, that's how physics works. It works by following these kinds of equations, and maybe they're more elaborate equations, and then the Einstein equations rather than the equations of Newtonian mechanics or whatever. But still, it's equations, it's equations all the way down. That's how the universe works. So in the 1980s, when I kind of started kind of really talking about the things in nature as being described computationally, it seemed very alien, particularly in physics. And in fact, that, that alien is even at the beginning of the 2000s, it was still feeling very alien in physics. How could it really be the case that sort of underneath all the physics is this discrete computational thing? Don't we know it's all equations all the way down? And, you know, that's a thing where I would say what I noticed is between 2002 of my big book New Kind of Science came out. And six years ago when we released the Wolfram Physics Project, there was a kind of quite an interesting change in kind of attitudes towards things. I mean, I think part of that change was the kind of decrease of self-esteem of the physics community, realizing no things like string theory and so on weren't going to deliver the full story. But also the fact that sort of everything had been sort of more obviously, the computation was a more obvious component as an important thing. That particularly came in through interesting quantum information and so on. But that's a place where those things had to be primed for in the world at large for at least lots of people to say, oh yes, that might make sense, as opposed to no, we know it doesn't work that way, so to speak. So here's a few thoughts about that. I think that in terms of things where people had the idea and it just outright went away, I mean, sometimes it's, well, okay, a good example would be again about computation. People like, well, particularly Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage kind of supporting that, this is 1840s, kind of had the idea of universal computation. But it just didn't really have the support. I mentioned this thing about functions that you can pick up and do things with and so on. It didn't really have that kind of support and it wasn't until really the 1930s, 1940s, that 100 years later more or less, that that really started getting legs and getting developed.