[In] Ancient Babylon... they were trying to predict three kinds of things.... where the planets would be, what the weather would be like, and who wou… - Stephen Wolfram

Computational reducibility may well be the exception rather than the rule: Most physical questions may be answerable only through irreducible amounts of computation. Those that concern idealized limits of infinite time, volume, or numerical precision can require arbitrarily long computations, and so be formally undecidable.

What's happened is, for 300 years people basically said, "If you want to make a model of things in the world, mathematical equations are the best place to go. In the last 15 years: it doesn't happen. New models... most often are made with programs, not with equations. ...Was that ...going to happen anyway? Was that a consequence of my particular work and my particular book? It's hard to know for sure. ...Was there a chain of academic references? Probably not.

If we describe... heat... the air... it's this temperature, this pressure. That's as much as we can say... People [from the future] will say, "I just can't believe they didn't realize that there was this detail and all these molecules that were bouncing around, and that they could make use of that." ...One of the scenarios for the very long term history ...is the where everything... becomes thermodynamically boring... equilibrium. People say that's a really bad outcome, but actually... it's an outcome where there's all this computation going on... molecules bouncing around in very complicated ways, doing this very elaborate computation. It just happens to be a computation that right now, we haven't found ways to understand... [O]ur brains... and our mathematics and our science... haven't found ways to tell an interesting story about that. It just looks boring to us.