The death of US computer scientist and physicist Edward Fredkin this June went largely unnoticed, except for a belated obituary in the New York Times. Yet despite never quite becoming the household name that some of his contemporaries did, Fredkin had an outsized influence on both of the disciplines that he straddled.
Many still baulk at his central contention: that the laws of physics, and indeed those of the Universe itself, are essentially the result of a computer algorithm. But the ‘digital physics’ that Fredkin championed has gone from being beyond the pale to almost mainstream. “At the time it was considered a completely crazy idea that computation science could teach you anything about physics,” says Norman Margolus, a Canadian computer scientist who was a long-time collaborator of Fredkin’s and his sole physics PhD student. “The world has evolved from then, it’s all very respectable now.”
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