Richard Feynman’s Advice to a Young Stephen Wolfram (1985)
«You don’t understand “ordinary people”. To you they are “stupid fools”»
Entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram is a unique egg. By age 14, he had written three books on particle physics. He earned his Ph.D. at age 20 and began publishing research papers at the age of 18, some of which have been cited thousands of times. His software package Mathematica is in its 12th edition. His 1197 page book “A New Kind of Science” was a best-seller, reaching #1 on Amazon when it was published in 2002.
On the 5th of February 2020, the once-boy-genius-turned-software-mogul took to Twitter to announce that he had been “working more intensely than ever … as a result of an unexpected scientific breakthrough I’m hoping to share soon”. Two months later, on April 14th, he posted a blog entry entitled “Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics…and It’s Beautiful”, which starts off on a similarly swaggering note:
“It’s unexpected, surprising — and for me incredibly exciting. To…