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Wolfram Reality
Stephen Wolfram finally published his book: A New Kind of Science has been more or less ten years on the make, and Terrence Sejnowski, who directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, said that "There is so much in the book that it will be years, literally years, before people assimilate it."
Asked why he has chosen to write a book for the general public, rather than for scientists alone, Wolfram said: "In the end, I have written A New Kind of Science mainly for myself. But I've been keen to give as many people as possible the opportunity to participate in the discoveries I've made. And the ideas in A New Kind of Science are big enough and new enough that I don't think scientists will have any advantage over anyone else in understanding what I'm talking about." In 1984 Steven Oppenheimer wrote in Science Digest that Wolfram thought that there were in nature many complicated systems that physics and biology break down into simple parts: cells, molecules, atoms, but that the great unsolved mystery is how raw, chaotic bits of matter combine to form complex structures - everything from snowflakes to human beings. Oppenheimer explains: "To find out how chaos becomes order, Wolfram has constructed his own computer-generated ordering process that mimics what happens in nature. It takes disordered data and, using a single rule for each case, builds an orderly system. The system, growing according to the rule, is called a cellular automaton." Ed Regis, in Who's Got Einstein's Office?, Addison-Wesley, 1987, has an interesting metaphor that describes deftly the subject: "Cellular automata are not real things, they're only abstractions, creatures of the intellect. But they're big with Wolfram and his cohorts because it turns out that, when these imaginary mechanisms are simulated by a computer, they replicate the operations of physical systems that are actually found in nature. This is a bit uncanny. It's as if someone wrote a novel--an utter fiction--and then discovered that everything in the novel had actually happened".
That´s a statement very close to what Ray Kurtzweil sees in Wolfram´s new book. Recently revising A New Kind of Science he said it is an unusually wide-ranging book covering issues basic to biology, physics, perception, computation, philosophy, etc., but that it is also a remarkably narrow book in that its 1,200 pages discuss a singular subject, that of cellular automata. Says Kurtweil: "Actually, the book is even narrower than that. It is principally about cellular automata rule 110 (and three other rules which are equivalent to rule 110), and its implications." Yet Wolfram has a far grander goal in view. Regis believes that he wants to explain not the complexity of any given phenomenon, but complexity itself, wherever it might be found, whether in the structure of galaxies, or in turbulent fluids, or in the nucleotide sequences of a DNA molecule. He wants to understand complexity, what's more, not in terms of the usual vehicle of mainstream physics, which is to say the differential equation, but in terms of something that is essentially new in science, the abstract, pattern-generating mechanisms known as cellular automata. Wolfram´s webpage (stephenwolfram.com) is an important place to visit if we want to understand his ideas and know something more about the man himself. It has a fine selection of articles written by and about Wolfram, and a scrapbook with old and new photographs and sketches. And back to Ed Regis, who tried to bring the subject to personal
matters and received a typical Wolfram answer: "With all
this constant traveling and work and science...uh, do you find the
time for any social life? You know, girlfriends and such?"
"Oh yes," Wolfram said. "If you're interested
in complex systems, there's nothing more complex than that."
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Meanwhile,
reactions to Mr. Wolfram, he believes, will be "all over the
map." Mr. Wolfram is sanguine: "I am quite certain this
is going to work. I have never deluded myself before." Edward
Rothstein, wrinting for the NY Times, says that "his claims
surpass the most extravagant speculation. He has, he argues, discovered
underlying principles that affect the development of everything
from the human brain to the workings of the universe, requiring
a revolutionary rethinking of physics, mathematics, biology and
other sciences". 
Regis
also tells us about the discovery of von Neumann by Wolfram and
how he got caught by the subject but didn´t like Neumann´s
approach: "Von Neumann had done something: he came up with
the original idea," Wolfram says. "The idea was
interesting, but the details, the construction he had made, it was
completely boring. It's this book full of the design drawings of
this completely weird object. The details of its implementation
are like the most arcane mathematical proof one's ever seen. I don't
know of any scientific thing that one learns from all those complicated
details. I mean it's an interesting tour de force, it's an impressive
proof--what he was trying to prove was that self-reproduction was
possible, and he succeeded in proving that--but the method of proof
was thoroughly arcane and complicated and I think not very illuminating
as such". Deeply interested, Wolfram turned 100% into cellular
automata and became what Tom Toffoli called " the Saint Paul
of cellular automata".
