On the Nature of Time

Stephen Wolfram argues that time is best understood as the progress of computation in the universe, and that our experience of time as a single flowing thread arises from the interplay between computational irreducibility and the computational boundedness of observers. He states that computational irreducibility means there is no shortcut to a system's future, so observers must trace each step, and that the Second Law of thermodynamics results from the same interplay. In the Physics Project, time corresponds to the progressive rewriting of a hypergraph, and the underlying structure is multithreaded, with many paths of history that observers perceive as a single path.