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Scientific context and criticism
A New Kind of Science drew wide attention and mixed reviews. Critics such as Cosma Shalizi and Scott Aaronson accepted results like the universality of rule 110 but disputed the claim of a scientific paradigm shift, and some reviewers said the book gave too little credit to earlier work on complexity. The Wolfram Physics Project is a research programme; it has not yet produced experimentally confirmed predictions. Wolfram has answered critics in his writings.
Life
Stephen Wolfram is a British-American scientist and entrepreneur. Born in London, he published papers in particle physics as a teenager and earned a PhD at Caltech at twenty; in 1981 he received a MacArthur Fellowship. His studies of cellular automata convinced him that very simple programs can generate great complexity. He founded Wolfram Research, which released Mathematica (1988) and later Wolfram|Alpha (2009). A New Kind of Science (2002) argues that exploring simple programs should become a new basis for science. Since 2020 the Wolfram Physics Project has sought a fundamental theory in which space-time emerges from rewriting rules on hypergraphs, and he writes on the 'ruliad', observers and AI.
The system
- Simple programs (such as cellular automata) can produce complexity that looks random.
- Computational irreducibility: some processes can only be known by running them.
- The 'ruliad': the entangled limit of all possible computations, with observers sampling it.
Key works
- A New Kind of Science (2002) Amazon
- A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics (2020) Amazon
- What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? (2023) Amazon
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Where to start
- A New Kind of Science is free to read online at wolframscience.com; chapter 1 and the notes on computational irreducibility are a good start.
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