It’s good to be sceptical about anyone claiming to rewrite the foundations of science, but this is just silly.
Here’s a list of his publications in peer-reviewed journals (more than 60, by my count). At the time of his first publication, in 1975, he was just 15 years old. At 20, he was granted a PhD in theoretical physics by Caltech; at 21, he was awarded a McArthur genius grant.
If you’re going to slag that guy, at least get it right.
I agree with hansel that Wolfram’s research record is far from that of a crank, but one does wonder about the extent to which he is respecting usual procedures these days. John Casti’s Nature review takes him to task for not providing any references whatsoever; apparently it’s easier for us to surf the web like he did, than for him to undertake the extra drudgery of keeping track of what’s from where.
It is odd though that he would seek to direct publish a book that has not seen the hand of any editor other than himself and keep it from peer review. It smells borderline nutty-obsessive.
It looks (possibly incorrectly) like he simply can’t stand to be criticized and that his ego and confidence in the inerrancy of his hypothesis is beyond Graf Zeppelin proportions, which is not a particularly good combination for doing good science, even given his previously demonstated brilliance as a mathematican.
Most comprehensive review I’ve seen to date
Reflections on Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science” by Ray Kurzweil
No, I haven’t waded through the darn thing myself (and wouldn’t understand it if I did; I’m a liberal arts chick). However, a grade school/high school buddy worked for him for a number of years, and is credited deep in one of the endnotes for the book. From the stories I’ve heard about what it’s liek to deal with Wolfram on a daily basis, the following article was pretty darn hilarious, though:
http://www.ridiculopathy.com/news_detail.php?id=625
Thought you geekier types might enjoy it.
—His ideas are either new nor revolutionary.—
Ah, but this “either/nor” gate could revolutionize modern computing!
There seem to be alot of people in this thread that are all too willing to jump on the “guy’s a crank” bandwagon. Wolfram is most assuredly NOT a crank. He may or may not be on to something; it’s hard to tell.
To put his thesis in very banal terms: Wolfram is suggesting that at the very heart of science is discrete mathematics. That’s right, the universe is basically a big gigantic binary calculator that, fractal like, reproduces itself in surprising ways. The devil is in the details, of course, and while Wolfram has a wide-ranging background and a lot of good solid science to stand on, his reductivism is perhaps a tad presumptuous.
That’s not to say he isn’t wrong. He may or may not “turn science on its ear”, but he isn’t exactly the first person to have an idea like the one he’s presenting. He has modeled a fairly deterministic universe that would be very well behaved in the same way computers are very well behave. Sounds almost Deist in a weird philosophical way. It certainly is acceptably materialist in its approach to science.
Wolfram’s persentation doesn’t say that what has been done for so long has been fruitless, but rather he is offering that all of scientific knowledge can be reintrepreted in another coherent manner. To wit, Wolfram is positing that there are fundamental discrete mathematics that belie our basic idea that there may yet be something called “free will”. It also neatly explains why mathematics underlies science so well, why phenomena seem so reproduceable, and why we in the modern world have had such success in explaining the outcomes of causally connected systems. In this way, his thesis is almost too good to be true. In effect, Wolfram has decided to tackle all the big questions now and let the details work themselves out in the wash. It’s debatable whether this technique is licit in the service of unifying science. Don’t you have to know what you’re actually unifying before you go about unifying it? The answer is, of course, it depends on what venue you have the discussion. Philosophers, if they can wade through it, may find Wolfram’s book to be much more pleasing than how scientists may find it.
Wolfram isn’t the first to do create a masterwork and declare it as such. In fact, many scientists are fond of positing their “grand schema” in soundbite ways to anyone who will listen. Wolfram’s soundbite just happens to be 1000+ pages and he himself happens to be extremely intelligent.
In the end, I think we have to admit that there is something strange and wonderful about Wolfram’s work… but it doesn’t hold the be-all-and-end-all of science. One reviewer lamented that Wolfram basically had suggested that learning calculus was a waste of time. I attended a lecture by a fractal modeler who was adamant that such conclusions were nonsense. The world can be modeled in many different ways and I don’t think Wolfram has definitively proven that it works in the way he thinks it does. It may actually be impossible to ever come to a point when such a statement can be made. We are probably wise to leave such questions, for the time being, to philosophers.
What is clear is that Wolfram has patiently put out the hints that the world behaves in logic gates and binary operations, but he doesn’t have all the answers to say the least.
Still, keep an eye on this stuff; it’s not complete quackery.
I have the book sitting on my shelf. I’ve only gotten through the first chapter, but it’s very intriguing thus far. It’s not exactly what I’d call the work of a crackpot.
I recently read this article and the above post and made a connection. It seems there is proof the second law might be wrong.
I also read the Kurzveil review. I just don’t understand the “breakthrough” part. Isn’t it pretty chaos-like?(I am far from an expert though)
Personally(as I said on another board) the ideas of “automata” reminded me of the quite old game of “Life”.
CarnalK: Conway’s Game of Life is a cellular automaton, and one of the simpler ones.
Ah, well I thought the descriptions were pretty darn similar. (BTW most of the downloadable “life” games allow you to change the rules of on/off. So on some at least you could change the complexity. Like Wolfram’s examples though they wouldn’t be multi-coloured).
Still, Conway came up with this idea in the sixties. Is Wolfram the only one who has tried to apply/further the concept?
Not by a long shot, although he’s probably the only person who’s attempted to popularize it. Cellular automata are a very active research area.
I don’ t think anyone thinks Wolfram is “crank”. His accomplishments are manifest and his brilliance is undeniable and
Wolfram may indeed be the genius of the age, but I am skeptical about anyone who seems to be positively allergic to potential criticism and peer review. I’m not going to be able to pretend that I understand 1/10th of the deeper mathematical fundamentals and relationships that Wolfram is proclaiming on, however, if I’m going to invest a huge chunk of time trying to analyze what he’s saying I would like the assurance of someone smarter than me that the effort is worthwhile.
The problem is really with this self publishing model he seems to have adopted as the means to promote his ideas. The standard model of “good” science is usually supposed to be based on some degree of peer review of the hypothesis being presented for consideration. That Wolfram has (in no small part because he can financially) decided to bypass the process of peer review as irrelevant to the truth of his insight is worrisome. I cannot recall any significant, fundamental scientific insight in the last 100 years that bypassed the peer review (on some level) process and went straight to the people. There are, however, innumerable crackpot theories that have done this.
Time will tell I suppose.
I apologize if this is a hijack, but how is self-publishing exempt from peer review? Scientists can certainly read the book just as well as the general public, and can write reviews / criticisms. Stephen Jay Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, comparable in size to Wolfram’s book, is a technical work, yet was published openly rather than in a scientific journal (wherein it would likely take several issues devoted entirely to the material at hand to include the whole thing!). The same can be said for another of Gould’s major technical works, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Hennig’s Phylogenetic Systematics is yet another example, just off the top of my head.
It seems to me that very detailed and specific work (of the sort the average layperson is generally not interested in) tends to get published in the peer-reviewed journals, while more generalized theories and such, perhaps because of their scope, tend more towards open-market book form.
Your point is not a hijack at all. It’s central to main issue surrounding the way Wolfram si presenting his ideas.
So let me understand. These published works by Gould and Hennig were not simply popular treatments or surveys of current theory relating to earlier work they had previously published in professional, peer reviewed journals, but were new, fundamental, paradigm changing hypotheses that bypassed the journals and went straight to books? Fascinating.
Your point is not a hijack at all. It’s central to main issue surrounding the way Wolfram is presenting his ideas.
So let me understand. These books by Gould and Hennig were not simply popular treatments or surveys of current theory relating to earlier work they had previously published in professional, peer reviewed journals, but were new, fundamental, paradigm changing hypotheses that bypassed the journals and went straight to books?
Oops. Note to self - Preview does not mean Post.
Sorry about that.
Gould’s Structure may well be a popularized treatment, but it is also representative of a paradigm shift within evolutionary thought; specifically, he formalizes the need for a hierarchical approach to selection, as opposed to the single-tiered approaches taken in the past (for example, Darwin’s own panselectionism, and recent advocates of the gene as the basis for all selection). Hennig’s book was likewise a major shift within taxonomic circles, as it laid out formal rules and methods for a new type of systematics: cladistics (it could probably be argued that it wasn’t exactly a “popularized” account, since most people probably don’t give a hoot about the implications and purpose of taxonomy).
While it falls outside of your 100 year timeframe, it may be worth noting that while Darwin did write what could be the equivalent of today’s scientific journal articles, he is most widely known for his public books: The Origin of Species, On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, and so on.
This is a quote from the Kurtzweil review link provided first by Astro. Sorry if too lengthy.
I am an amatuer when trying to digest the topic(even though my degree is in a physical science). But does the passage that I quote merely mean that Wolfram’s theory’s aren’t sophisticated enuff to explain the complexity of a living being, or is the reviewer saying that Wolfram’s theories fall apart when trying to explain something as complicated as a life form?