Science Quote by Stephen Wolfram

Wolfram is letting you watch the sell happen in real time: a modest, meandering recollection that quietly smuggles in a sweeping ambition. The hesitations ("rather gradually", "I must say") perform scientific humility, but the destination is grand: not just better equations, but a deeper substrate for law itself. That phrase "computers and things" is doing double duty. On the surface it sounds casual, almost offhand; underneath it signals a civilizational pivot. Once computation becomes a common tool, it becomes an imaginable ontology: maybe nature is not best described by continuous mathematics, but by discrete, executable rules.

The key move is the shift from rules that predict nature to rules that describe nature, and then to "a more general basis" for those rules. He's reaching for meta-law: an account of why the laws we have look the way they do, rooted in computational processes like cellular automata and algorithmic complexity. It's the Wolfram project in miniature: physics as emergent behavior from simple programs, where complexity is not a mystery to be solved but a phenomenon that naturally arises.

Context matters: he’s speaking from the late-20th-century moment when computers stopped being niche calculators and became a metaphor machine for everything from brains to markets. The subtext is also a challenge to traditional physics prestige. If the right foundation is computational, then the gatekeepers shift: insight might come from programming and experimentation as much as from analytic proof. The quote’s gradual cadence is strategic; revolutionary claims land better when they sound like an inevitability you merely noticed first.