If we want to have a predictable life... then we have to build in these... pockets of reducibility. If we were... existing in this irreducible world,… - Stephen Wolfram

It was the spring of 1978 and I was 18 years old. I’d been publishing papers on particle physics for a few years, and had gotten quite known around the international particle physics community (and, yes, it took decades to live down my teenage-particle-physicist persona). I was in England, but planned to soon go to graduate school in the US, and was choosing between Caltech and Princeton. And one weekend afternoon when I was about to go out, the phone rang. In those days, it was obvious if it was an international call. “This is Murray Gell-Mann”, the caller said, then launched into a monologue about why Caltech was the center of the universe for particle physics at the time.

It's always seemed like a big mystery how nature, seemingly so effortlessly, manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex. Well, I think we found its secret. It's just sampling what's out there in the computational universe.

I thought... I had a pretty good idea for what the structure of this... theory that's underneath space and time and so on might be like. ...I thought, "Gosh, in my lifetime... we might be able to figure out what happens in the first 10^-100 seconds of the universe. ...It's pretty far from anything that we can see today and it would be ...hard to test for what's right ...To my huge surprise, although it should have been obvious, ...we managed to get unbelievably much further than that. ...It turns out that even though there's this ...bed of computational irreducibility that ...all these simple rules run into, ...there are ...certain pieces of computational reducibility that ...generically occur for large classes of these rules, and... the big pieces of computational reducibility are ...the pillars of 20th century physics. That's the amazing thing, that general relativity and quantum field theory... turn out to be precisely the stuff you can say. There's a lot you can't say... at this... irreducible level where you.. don't... know what's going to happen. You have to run it [and] you can't run it within our universe... The things you can say turn out to be, very beautifully, exactly the structure that was found in 20th century physics...