Stephen Wolfram: Definitely. In fact, it was my favorite movie, and I ended up seeing it quite a few times.

Stork: What was it that you liked about the film?

Wolfram: Mostly the technology. It was all so majestic and so alive. I followed the United States space program quite a bit in those days, but I was disappointed when I realized that the insides of spacecraft were the size of closets. In 2001 there was great technology all over the place, and everyone seemed to be using it.

Stork: Did you identify with any of the characters in 2001?

Wolfram: Not really. At the time, I was young, and they all seemed quite old, and very American. Growing up in England, all that "Roger your plan to go EVA" stuff seemed pretty foreign to me. I guess I didn't ever imagine talking like that. One thing, though, was that I was definitely very interested in one day being around the kind of technology that was in the movie. At that time, I thought that meant I'd have to join NASA or something. I'm sure I didn't think about it in those terms, but I certainly didn't imagine the kind of flattening of access to technology that's actually happened.

Stork: You just watched 2001 again tonight. What strikes you most about the movie now?

Wolfram: Well, it seemed a lot shorter than when I was a kid! It also seemed to make a lot more sense. I guess now I at least think I understand how all the pieces are supposed to fit together. And they really raise some very interesting questions. But let's talk about that later.

Another thing that struck me a lot watching 2001 this evening was how incredibly emotionally cold it is. I don't think I noticed that at all when I was a kid. But seeing the movie now I'm just amazed at how little human emotion there is in it. I think HAL was the most emotive of the bunch. When I was a kid I guess I had this vague idea that scientists were the kind of emotionless characters I saw portrayed in the movie. They never seemed to get excited about anything. Maybe that's a bit of what's wrong with science, actually. For most people there's so little passion in it. Just get the data, try to be fair to the data, and all that. Kubrick may have had that exactly right.

Anyway, you asked what struck me about the movie. Well, another thing is how rich almost every scene is. There were so many details, so many things that someone must have really thought about. It's a damned good piece of work. And I suppose what's nice about it is that enough people think so that every scene has really been studied carefully. And people are even writing books about what happened in the movie. Like this one, I guess!

Stork: A lot of things haven't worked out exactly as 2001 predicted. Does that surprise you?

Wolfram: Well, given the level of detail in the movie, it was an absolute setup to be proven wrong. I've got to say that I'm really impressed by how much the movie got right. And I think a lot of the mistakes are really interesting mistakes -- mistakes that one learns something from by seeing why they were made. I actually think quite a lot about trying to predict things, and I find it incredibly useful to go back and see why mistakes in prediction get made.