Physics is the foundation of all natural sciences. Chemistry emerges when atoms gather; biology emerges when molecules organize; minds and societies emerge further up. The sciences form a tower. Each level is governed by the levels beneath it. And nothing at any level has ever broken the laws of physics at the bottom.
Known laws, unknown consequences
For essentially everything on Earth (materials, chemicals, devices, flow, heat, light, life), the laws of physics are known, and have been since quantum mechanics joined electromagnetism about a century ago. Physics still has true frontiers of discovery, at energies no accelerator has reached and at the edges of the cosmos, but what remains unknown there lies far from practical life on Earth.
Yet knowing the laws is not the same as knowing what they do. “More is different,”1 as the Nobel laureate Philip Anderson put it: at every scale where countless pieces interact, the whole shows behavior that no piece has on its own — no molecule of water is wet, no carbon atom is alive, no single neuron remembers. Four centuries of science worked downward, reducing the world to its laws. Working upward from the laws back to the world has never been possible, because the only way up is to compute, piece by piece, interaction by interaction. That is the remaining frontier: not what is the law, but what does the law do?
The uncomputed world
Everything made and everything alive is physics running at scale. The tower is the world. Computation today reaches only the thinnest slice at the bottom of it: one physics, at one scale, one part at a time. Even that slice reshaped engineering. Wings once shaped in wind tunnels are now shaped in computation; chips are verified before a single wafer is cut. Above that slice, physics couples to physics, scales interact with scales, and parts assemble into wholes. Each level multiplies the computation, and a few levels up, it exceeds every computer on Earth combined.
For the past decade, artificial intelligence has had a bottomless appetite for computation, each year bigger than the last; today it is an industry. Computing the world from its physics has the same appetite. Physics has been an ingredient in every industry, never the product — its own industry is still waiting to be built.
The first physics company
Our mission is the computational prediction of phenomena of increasing complexity, bottom-up, rooted in first-principles physics, scaled by compute. We begin at the foundation, where the laws are exact, and climb: from one physics to coupled physics, from components to whole systems, and onward, past engineering, up the tower. Every answer traces back to exact law.
Our highest ambition is to simulate the emergence of life from first-principles physics, before humanity colonizes Mars.
Footnotes
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P. W. Anderson, “More Is Different,” Science 177, 393–396 (1972). ↩