A Man Who Would Shake Up Science

[Dave Monroe]

>From Edward Rothstein, "A Man Who Would Shake Up
Science," NY Times, Saturday, May 11th, 2002 ...

Some images on the back jacket of Stephen Wolfram's
1,197-page tome, "A New Kind of Science," are
familiar: a splash of liquid, jets of gas, sea
anemone, ancient mosaics and mollusk shells. But
others become understandable only after working
through ideas in this much-awaited book: spindly
sketches of leaves and snowflakes, a baroque lacework
of light, schematic diagrams that waver under the
gaze. 

Many of these images, created by Mr. Wolfram, are
ghostlike reductions of familiar objects, skeletal
representations of processes that may lie beneath
natural forms. And they were produced during a decade
of work that was kept hidden from professional
scrutiny. 

Now Mr. Wolfram is finally publishing his work, and
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. He believes he has shown
how the most complex processes in nature can arise out
of elemental rules, how a wealth of diverse phenomena
—the infinite variety of snowflakes and the patterns
on sea shells — are generated from seemingly trivial
origins

Conducting experiments on a computer, where he says he
has logged 100 million keystrokes in the last 10
years, Mr. Wolfram wrote simple programs that
generated odd and intricate patterns to test his ideas
about complexity. He then tried to imitate designs
found in nature. He argues that natural phenomena can
be explored as if they were, in fact, computer
programs, their evolution and behavior the products of
intricate calculations. 

"I have discovered vastly more than I ever thought
possible," Mr. Wolfram writes in the book's preface,
"and in fact what I have done now touches almost every
existing area of science, and quite a bit besides." 

These might seem the claims of a semimystical
scientific crank....

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/11/arts/11WOLF.html?todaysheadlines

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