This is the second of a series of excerpts from my recent conversation with Jonathan Gorard, who was instrumental in the founding of The Wolfram Physics Project.I asked Jonathan why he found the computational approach to physics so compelling.In his answer, he broached a wide range of fascinating topics in the philosophy of science:
how we moved from a clockwork paradigm in the age of clockwork to a computational paradigm in the age of computation;
how saying that the universe is computational is different from saying that the universe is a computer;
how our adoption of mathematics as the basis for physics has biased us to think of space-time as continuous;
how the history of science might have been different had Turing been born before Newton;
how the Wolfram Model can be thought of as a way of building a constructivist foundation for physics.
This led us to discuss a couple of the deeper questions of Wolfram Physics:
is it possible to know whether the universe is continuous or discrete?
does the hypergraph really exist?
—Jonathan Gorard
Jonathan Gorard at The Wolfram Physics Project
Jonathan Gorard at Cardiff University
Jonathan Gorard on Twitter

The Centre for Applied Compositionality
The Wolfram Physics Project
People and Concepts mentioned by Jonathan
Isaac Newton
René Descartes

Democritus
John Locke
Bishop Berkeley

Corpuscularianism
Atomism
Alan Turing
Turing machines
Lambda calculus
Recursively Enumerable Functions
Constructivism
L. E. J. Brouwer
David Hilbert
Intuitionism—I release The Last Theory as a video too! Watch here.Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.