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Wolframania
An Anonymous Coward writes "The New York Times has had a couple of articles about Stephen Wolfram in the last couple of weeks. Is he self-aggrandizing or brilliant? Or both? And is God a software engineer?" I thought our reader-contributed review of ANKOS was quite good.
A quote from each article:
Everywhere you look, almost everyone is saying, well, even if he is wrong, he's written a hell of a book. Which I suppose is true.
If "GOD" is a software engineer, what language does he use?
I'm guessing he started out with COBOL due to the stability of the world, but around the time the dinosaurs got nuked he was persuaded to switch to Visual BASIC by Satan(last name Gates) and ever since we've had nothing but one general protection fault after another.
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
Is he self-aggrandizing or brilliant?
... Based on the number of frosh at my alma matter that cringe at the mention of the name "Mathematica", I'd say he's the antichrist.
"Life is hard, but it's harder if you're stupid"
He uses a classification of 256 particular 2D autometa for a lot of the examples in the book that's kind of interesting. I took the time to write some code for it to explore the various permutations. It's CGI-based and it generates a png or jpeg image, so just throw it in your cgi-bin and check it out. The comments list the various options you can send it.
www.stephenwolfram.com
Another good article about his latest work: On Forbes
The front page has a link to this article through science.slashdot.org. That name does not resolve. The link is fine if you take out the "science". Hmm... I didn't actually mean that as commentary :-)
Explaining the universe with equations is flawed; we should be explaining it a cellular automata, or as a computer program...
but we know that cellular automata and computer programs can be expressed fundamentally as equations..... no?
you're an idiot!
about a serious scientist claiming that his theories would replace the entire physical model of the universe ?
Some geniuses did such work, but I never have heard anyone of them making such claims without the in-depth review of others. I must admit I've never heard of any genius exaggerating his own theories so much at all.
Some people say that's a relatively sure sign for being a crackpot.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
For example, the concept that while we can only perceive three spatial dimensions physics may actually give us up to ten (some of which instantly imploded after the Big Bang) is fascinating. Also, I enjoyed the idea that science is a language and we are all paragraphs. Truly remarkable stuff: I recommend this article for an in-depth analysis.
Not skim it, I mean read it. I was going to pick it up for my vacation coming up, and really want to know if it's worth the effort, or do you end up with that odd "cold fusion" feeling of being fed a bucket of horse crap?
He swallows his own ejaculate.
Wolfram's book is a very long slog. For inspiration to keep the appetite whetted have a look at Barabasi's - Linked: The New Science of Networks (http://www.nd.edu/~networks/linked/). The nice thing is you can also look at some of his papers in peer reviewed journals at http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs where you can see that he has been cited in the works of others. It may give you a better feel for the merit of Wolfram's tome by comparing his work to that of a peer-reviewed colleague.
One thing that I get from the book is more support for the idea that information processing may be more important to the Universe than physical matter.
Permit a tangent here: a few years ago (July 1999), I went to a Quantum Approaches to Consciousness meeting at NAU. One current popular theory is that matter in the universe is an uncollapsed wave equation with infinite extent until some form of consciousness observes the matter in question - it is the act of observation that collapses the quantum wave equation.
Anyway, interesting ideas that are supported by many in the physics community (my Dad is a physicist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a few of his aquaintances presented papers at the quantum consciousness meeting) and worthy, I think, to at least not be tossed in /dev/null.
Back to the topic: I suspect that Wolfram's book will not drastically change the world of science, but it is fun to read.
-Mark
Are you kidding? You mean you hadn't already figured that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and all its quantum-physical consequences are the ultimate kludge to prevent us from looking too deeply into the fact that the entire universe is a simulation, and liable to be switched off at any moment, 'cos the programmer's got bored with it? ;-)
Hold on, this is a flame, right?
Well, if he is I refuse to work with his code, not until he comes back and notates it properly.
1) Dr. Wolfram, right or wrong, deserves a HUGE amount of credit for any number of things. He has been a major contributor to scientific thought since his teenage years. He is one of those rare individuals that consistantly produce. Like Erdos, Euler, Pascal, Heisenberg, and many others before him, his recognition is very "local" at the time of his discoveries with only one or two things (mathematica, this book) that come to the attention of the general public. I think that in coming years, perhaps after his death, the name "Stephen Wolfram" will be remembered by mathematics, physics, and computer science students forever. :)
r tnet.com/~johnny
BTW, I support the 'Theory of Computational Equivalence'.
As for God, everyone knows that he writes in "OCCAM".
Have a wonderful day, and god bless
-johnny
johnny@martnet.com
http://www.ma
He hasn't written a "hell of a book", it's boring and repetative, presents nothing really new and this old stuff is mostly what others have discovered, although he makes it sound that he has. Moreover, the book is a gross exaggeration in terms of new science or physics.
On the positive side, it does show off some useful techniques for simulation some process and things.
Amazon's self-selected (biased) sample of readers gives a different than glowing view of Wolfram and his new book.
In the final analysis, to me this guys a liar, crank or both, and his book is a self-promoting con job.
A much better new book at 1/3 the price is Christian De Quincey's, "Radical Nature."
That's sort of like saying, being a painter and having no real clue of paint. Archimedes? Newton? Maxwell? Laplace? Legendre? Einstein? It is no accident that major fields in mathematics have been opened up by
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
(day1) first 350 pages are a bit slow
(day2) starts to hot-up around pg. 525
(day3) pg. ~650, first application of this new learning
** there were a lot fewer pictures after this so now it's bathroom reading. i'm good 'til 2003 with this one.
If god is a software engineer, then lets hope he is a responsible one and never checks his email with lookout express. I would hate existence to get written over by a virus.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Just because you can draw a picture of a snowflake with a CA, that does not mean a CA created the snowflake.
Submitted to Amazon on Friday:
***** = A massive acheivement
Reviewer: James Mitchell from San Francisco, CA United States
Stephen Wolfram's 'A new kind of science' is a massive achievement, true to the grandest traditions of self-publishing. In this stunningly beautifully laid out tome, Wolfram displays the fruits of long, intense dedication to the most sublime hubris, progressing from what are genuinely intriguing results of arduous empirical research to sweeping delusions of competance. Who would have thought that you could replicate the behavior of fluid movement on a computer by explicitly modelling it? Stunning, indeed. Doubly stunning is that a work of such gargantuan inanity could contain such a concise and lucid explanation of chaotic processes. That a mind that can so clearly explain the phenomenon of super-critical dependence on initial conditions can also produce so much excess self-congratulation for producing such a vapid vehicle for presenting this work will provide excellent working material for budding young doctoral candidates in psychology.
In its best movement, Wolfram's book spends a great deal of time demonstrating how his computational artifacts are unable to work out the results of constraints, in the process demonstrating the total futility of over a decade's worth of research. Amazingly, Wolfram presents the inapplicability of his work as a mark of its virtue -- that you can produce totally unpredictable and incomprehensible behavior without regard to the actual process one is researching. Given an intellect of such Colossal stature as Wolfram's, this massive tome is in and of itself the most solid, bulletproof example of the value of peer-review. That such a Herculean effort by such a gifted mind could produce a work of such stunning irrelevence should dissuade even the most ardent researcher from removing himself or herself from the academic community.
In addition to being the absolute paragon of case-studies for the value of peer-review, the book is also physically beautiful; it's rich yellow and black artwork will spice up even the most pedestrian of bookcases.
--- The reclining dragon deeply fears the blue pool's clarity.
Like this you mean?
Here's the overriding truth of worldviews and metaphors: For at least the past five hudnred years, we in the West have taken the dominant mode of industry and "explained" both human consciousness and the Godhood in terms of it.
First, of course, industry was agriculture... and God was basically a farmer, creating and tilling the Earth, making it ripe.
Then we came upon clockworks. (Too many miss the deep pyschological impact that the idea of time-keeping had upon the world.) Nice orderly systems that run more or less regularly, mimicking the order seen in, say, the motion of planets. And here, of course, God is the ultimate watchmaker.
The Age of Steam comes next and now God is the ultimate civil enginner. The Universe is a vast and complicated -- but ultimately comprehensible -- machine. It's made of discrete little bits that fall into recognizable types. If we understand the types and how they interact, we can reverse-engineer the machine.
Now we're in the Age of Information. The rising dominant archetype is the digital computer, revolutionizing our world the way that the steam engine did the 1700s. It almost goes without saying that of course some people are going to see digital computers in everything -- even the deepest bits of the Universe -- and so of course someone is going to claim God is the ultimate software engineer.
My impression is that these metaphors reveal less about God than they do about us... we don't come any closer to understanding God through them, but we might -- if we pay attention -- come closer to understanding how we understand ourselves.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Yes, I read it. (although long, it really isn't that hard of a book -- Wolfram, like the late Stephen Jay Gould, often uses more words than he needs, and besides that the book is double spaced and full of pictures).
The real problem is that his key Principle of Computational Equivilence is simply asserted. Wolfram believes that nothing in the universe (including quantum computers!) can really be more powerful than his CA's. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but I'm certainly not convinced.
If you want to find out more about him check under his alias on google, "Stephen Tungsten"!
Veramocor
The book is good, but it's very hard to pass through the self propaganda, ego centric claims... The results are not that amazing. Though they are quite good. Pity Wolfram thought that by avoiding peer review he could inflate his results. Instead he is being ridiculed by lesser minds for saying silly things in a book that's too long and too much self advertising.
Read the book, with the clear idea that Wolfram is neither Newton, nor Darwin.
Instead of producing a revolution this book may delay it, as quacks start imitating Wolfram (who is, certainly, not a quack) approach to self publicize science. In 10 years this book will be forgotten...
Newton modest!!! Perhaps you unaware of how he treated other scientists of his era. Look into his treatment of Flamsteed, Leibnitz, or Hooke sometime. The 'shoulders of giants' quote was a dig at the small statured Hooke.
Einstien? The guy who as part of his divorce settlement gave his ex the winnings from his not yet awarded Nobel prize modest?
Don't know about Feynman ...
As to the technology bit, what technology did Newton give us? Maxwell? Einstein? Galilleo? Feynman? Darwin? Euler? [your favorite here ...]
Note I didn't ask what technology did their discoveries give rise to, but what technology did they themselves develop? (And to make my point perfectly clear, not all scientists are inventors. I am perfectly aware that some are.)
Wolfram sounds like a lot of scientists. He also sounds like a lot of crackpots. His track record should at least get him a hearing. And he should be judged on his ideas. Not on his personality nor his treatment of others.
One final thought. Wolfram's modus operandi is at least superficially similar to Newton's. Both worked alone. Both were dismissive of those whose work came before them. And at least one changed the scientific worldview big time.
Steve M
This has happened before [1996]:
Google Groups: View Thread "Article on Wolfram/Mathematica in Wall St Journal"
Lots of newbies posting this afternoon...
I was one of the early reviewers of the book, I received an 'alpha' copy more than 1 year ago. Believe me, there was no 'surrounding with sycophants' here. It was written largely in isolation. Maybe 100 people got to see it when it was about 6 months away from the press. There was simply no way Wolfram was going to change it by then, and he knew that. I'm certain that he and his handlers were told of the controversial nature of the book, some of us echoed the annoying writing style comments as well. It really wasn't a concern as far as I was able to understand. The book had been incubating for 10+ years and it was time to fish-or-cut-bait.
I and others mentioned the excessive "me me me", lack of bibliographic material, starting every other sentence with a proposition, etc. I was asked to review one of the 'specialty' areas of the book and couldn't say anything 'nice' about any of it, since it doesn't really address the questions that it claims to.
BUT--- this is, after all, his own work, it is printed on a vanity press, he is independently wealthy, he really has the right to say whatever the hell he wants to. Fortunately, of course, we also have the right to say anything we want as well.
Is it science? Does it propose a testable (and falsifiable) hypothesis? Does it explain phenomena not previously understandable?
Is it new? Is there anything that is not a corollary, albeit elaborate, of the work of Turing and Von Neumann and of the development of computational science over the past fity years?
The Eponymous Mallard
"Graccito Ergo Sum" -- I quack therefore I am.
Einstein's theories of relativity that combine the above, are more accurate and elegant (i.e. conceptually simpler) than the two. But the more accurate predictions do not mean that the model is any closer to the 'real' workings of nature.
Wolfram's model may be even more accurate, but there can never be a conclusive proof if it really reflects the reality.
I remember a lecture by Benoit Mandelbrot I attended a few years ago. He showed the exactly same idea as Wolfram is explaining, that starting from very simple algorithms you could iterate many natural patterns. What really struck me was Mandelbrot's note on the idea of patterns themselves: "Are there patterns out there in nature, or are the patterns only in our heads?"
The latter possibility comes back to what you've explained, that the model tells more about the current society, than it does about nature. Of course, the question looks like it can never really be answered.
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
Someone needs a hug.
winner! winner! we have a winner!
best left-handed compliment ever dished out!
i thought i wanted SW's massive yet attractive tome for father's day, but JM's review has iced the cake for me and made me decide that no amount of yellow and black artwork could make me happier than a hug from mah kid. and the hug will no doubt be a lil more relevant than intense naval-gazing.
kudos, JM, from J Miller
Wait a minute wtf is maths? I always thought it was Math as in Mathematics. Now there is maths? I think you "mathematicians" are just making math plural to create more jobs for mathematicians.
Anyway if it wasn't for physicists putting math or maths to practical real work, math or maths would be as worthless as philosophy.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
See here for a page that links to about 15 reviews of ANKOS. My favorite is this review for the Mathematical Association of America.
Obviously this is directed at the people who've read the book:
Can someone explain why does this guy believe Cellular Automata are going to replace mathematics? Is there something CAs can compute or express that math can't? Or does he content that for some formulae, a CA representation is more compact that standard mathematics? Or are they somehow better than Turing machines due to their parallel nature or something?
I mean, CAs are fun to watch and all, but he's got to present a reason somewhere...
< sarcasm > As if you could write a virus in Perl! < /sarcasm >
;)
PERL IS a virus!
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
self-aggrandizing
brilliant
- Rob
Then surely he's using Microsoft!!! Just look at the platypus and the banana!!!
Mechanical engineer: "God must have been a mechanical engineer. Just look at all those beams and joints in the human body."
Electrical engineer: "No, surely he is an electrical engineer, it's obvious from the nervous system."
Chemical engineer: "Guys, you got it all wrong. God is a chemical engineer. I mean, who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?"
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
Has Wolfram invented something besides giving a new name to the Game of Life and Fractal mathematics?
Go to a library and browse through books about Fractals made in the 70's and you can easily spot that things "invented" by Wolfram had been discovered ages ago but there were no computers to test them.
But then again, most of the great scientist have never invented anything by themselves, they just have gathered up other scientists theories into a single theory.
And all along we thought God screwed up by making the world with all these problems.
Maybee he just wants to see then end result too.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
It's scary that you're aware that site exists.
Maybe it's not the Supreme Being, whose name is GOD, but the name of the software used to develop us.
See Comment #4 with the date of June 18, 1999 This is NOT part 4 of the first comment
Not really the algorythim, but rather the set of elements of the holy grail of algorythim possibilities, and rationality of why.
Though he gets history of Usenet wrong, what he identifies does allow for the building of complexity from the simple and even why it's done.
For those who haven't read the book and are wondering whether it's worth the 1,000 page trek, there's a good review by Kurzweil. I went through about 100 pages of the book, waiting for the big, "so what." After reading Kurzweil's review, I think that "so what" will never happen, and he explains why.
Philosophistry
From the artical:
:P
Just last week, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Seth Lloyd published a paper in Physical Review Letters estimating how many calculations the universe could have performed since the Big Bang -- 10120 operations on 1090 bits of data, putting the mightiest
Hrm, think they meant 10^120 and 10^90 there. Even the 4004 could handle that
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Actually I haven't read his book and I won't because I found this on his homepage:
"He is widely regarded as one of the world's most original scientists, as well as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today."
The most important innovator? He reminds me of Kim Schmitz (kimble) that self proclaimed "hacker-god".
Maybe his ideas are worth a read, but I don't think he took enough other ideas into consideration.
A big problem is, that most of the _really_ brilliant scientists don't "waste" their time by writing such books and don't get much attention from the broad public.
I think this whole "few lines of code" talk is just a publicity gag.
I've read the first 150 pages or so, so I might be missing something big, but from the reviews I've read, I don't think so.
1) He's totally self-aggrandizing. It's really irritating to read, actually.
2) The "discoveries" he made might lend some insight into the way things in nature work, and help provide a better understanding of our world, but they're not the type of thing that can be leveraged to actually MAKE something useful. If you read between the lines, he pretty much says this himself.
3) I think the most important result, and contribution, is that he might trigger some real research in the field of highly parallel algorithms / computing methods. These have real power, and I think moving them to the mainstream is important.
Perhaps the most interesting is Scot Aaranson's, submitted to Quantum Information and Computing, where some of Wolfram's claims are actually unearthed and analysed by someone who knows their stuff.
Here's a quote from the conclusion of that review:
[Wolfram has supplied a construction of a UTM for a "rule 110" 1D CA, found by a worker at Wolfram Research. I think he means this. However, Wolfram has failed to note that the construction involves exponential slowness as the complexity of the input increases..]
[Apparently Wolfram hints in ANKOS that he has worked out details of this using standard physics formalisms, but he is shy about providing them, apparently preferring that physicists should do the constructions themselves!].
[There's a section in the review which analyses Wolfram's theories in the light of Bell's theorem, and apparently finds big fault with it.]
In general, Aaronson finds that Wolfram's decision to go it alone works to the detriment of the book, but still credits it with being an excellent popularisation of many scientific fields, once you subtract the posturing and grandiose claims about CA. A common thread in some of the more literate reviews is that Wolfram ignores and downplays the work of many people in fields where he's claiming to have made big advances.
.sigs: Just Say No!
Maybe synapses are just network nodes and the real computation is happening at the molecular level (DNA, RNA or both)?
.
Would be funny if "junk" DNA is actually compressed data. .
Well, that's your choice, but you won't have any kids that way.
Wolfram's book arrived yesterday by the post. I haven't started it, but I bought it because in the last time I am more and more convinced that life is software.
Many hints from genetics specially, point to a stored program, being interpreted in the ribosomes, and translated into polymers whose sequence is *written* in the gene's bases.
I put the *written* in emphasis because I do not know what to do with the concept. Written implies a writer, and a reader comunicating at atomic leves with each other. The ribosome reads the genome and translates those sequences into machines that perform specific chemical reactions (enzymes for instance) or in structures that build our body/muscles/bones/organs whatever, or in stored memories, and many *many* other things that we have no idea of.
That kind of software is runnig in real time in our bodies each milisecond. And it has been running in this planet since at least 3.8 billion years. Its breathing has changed the atmosphere of this planet, filling it with oxygen. It thrives on a small bit fromm infalling solar energy and runs in a closed circuit, using that kind of energy (in the surface) as source.
Our brains are running with only 5 Watts of power, and process information in parallel using millions of specialized units in a neural network.
Software has been running here for 3.8 billion years yes, but never has had the need of doing what it has done now. An intelligent being, more autonomous and endowed with a self and a user interface for that self.
The brain comes with a user interface between the body and software consciousness. This user interface edits sensations for consciousness and presents input data from the senses in an organized fashion.
The body user interface is obviously not in input only. It outputs concrete actions as defined by consciousness.
For instance, you use that user interface when you think:
I want to remember this.
Your memory interface takes over and writes those bits somewhere in your personal database.
You use that interface when you think:
Grasp that beer.
Your arm user interface fires those nerves that trigger a chemical reaction contracting the muscles, your eye, working with the muscles directly through sensors feedback loop guides your arm to the glass, you take it and you drink.
Wow it was a hot day today.
Our user interface is so supreme and sophisticated that we give it the best noting that a user can give to the user interface: it is really transparent.
So transparent that we forget to see it.
We just use it.
There are, generally speaking, two kinds of science.
Some sciences are descriptive and others are predictive. Physics is the ultimate in predictive science where temendously precise pridictions
about interactions can be calculated in advance. But there's a limit to what we can reasonably calculate. Many problems, like a Newtonian
3-body problem, have no closed solution and require numeric approximations to calculate anything. Other problems exhibit sensitivity to initial conditions and result in chaotic behavior. Precise predictions are no longer possible.
Other sciences are descriptive. They attempt to classify and organize observations into meaningful systems. Cladistics, pre-Darwin, described anatomical similarities between known species. Eventually, the resulting family arrangements were understood as evidence of underlying evolutionary processes whereby closely related species were
only recetly divergent and species with greater differences were less closely related.
Wolfram offers us a little of both in A New Kind of Science (which I have bought, browsed, but not yet read in depth). Only time will tell
if the systems he's calaloged will pay off in other disciplines. It may very well be that, once we know what to look for, natural analogues
of his systems may be all around us waiting to be discovered.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Wolfram's book is just a belated promo for cellular automata (that stuff was cool a few decades ago when Conway at Princeton was playing around with the game of Life on his computer ... Conway is a real mathematician by the way who has done some very legitimate work.)
The real genius of Wolfram is not his "formula" that claims to explain the world, but how he has bilked universities and research institutes around the world in the untold millions for Mathematica site licenses.
It is not an understatement to call Wolfram the Microsoft of scientific computing software. Both Gates and Wolfram dropped out of academia to create their respective computing empires. Both use proprietary data formats to lock in their customers. Both go to school campuses and offer students the "first hit" for free.
Gates' used a little of Dad's money (wealthy Washington lawyer) to get his start. Wolfram, in a stroke of true genius, used his McArthur grant to set up shop.
The book is just a farce to make the hungry programmers who bang their heads trying to fix the bugs in Mathematica (and there are many) feel like Wolfram is doing something useful for his hefty paycheck while they sweat through their mundane chores. Can't you just hear them whispering to each other "When is Stevie Wonderboy going to tell us how the universe got started?"
If you are at a university that has a site license for Mathematica, ask the university to consider canceling the license and purchasing the open-source REDUCE system instead. It is an older product than Mathematica and lacks a slick GUI interface. This is no longer a problem though because REDUCE interfaces nicely with TeXmacs, and if you haven't heard about the latter, check out this Metafont-based WYSIWYG scientific editor at www.texmacs.org.
The above represents a slightly revised version of my earlier post. To read some of the Slashdot replies visit:
here
Otherwise, it seems like Wolfram is getting praised on the "Galileo's wetnurse" principle -- not for doing anything noteworthy himself, but rather for influencing others who might/might not do something worthwhile.
Speaking as a physics grad student who actually did my undergraduate thesis on the intersection of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics (a subject cranks love to target), *everybody* has a theory about the fundamental underlying principles of the universe. Very few people have the ability to explain a single phenomenon rigorously and well. Save your praise for the latter.
I am a scientist, computational chemist. I have some serious issues with the peer review system. DO you know that in acedimc science you are only percieved as being a good scientis if you have many publications? DO you also know that when you submit a paper to be peer-reviewd, your name stays on the paper and often times people will not allow a paper to be published because they don't like the person. Yes this does happen occasionally. It doesn't always happen and there are some good sides to the perr review process. For those of you on this board that aren't in sciend or still in school I ask you to go get a copy of the Journal of Medicial chemistry. It will only cost you a couple thousand dollars/yr for a subscription. Yes their are other online peer-review journals that are popping up that I am greatly n favor of. Hoever if you publish in one of these journals people will think that your work is inferior and most will not take you seriously. Academia used to be about sharing knowledge. Well I can tell you..at least were I got my Ph.D., That it isn't like that any more. No-one wants to talk about their research for belief that others will steal thier ideas. Often time sinterscaool research groups don't even talk to each other.
With that said I am about half way through Woolframs book. I believe that he is both a crack pot and a genius. He is a ver arrogant man. He should give credit to work that others have done and not pretend to have come up with it all on his own. Yes I belive that he has pushed this field along, but He didn't come up with the idea for cellular automata on his own. Once one gets past the first, self riteous chapter, the book is a stimulating read. cool stuff and the coding involved to produce mose of the pictures in the book is trivial. I wrote severl small programs just so I could see the results for myself. I think the Wolfram is right. I think that this branch of science will grow. It won't replace differential equations tho. Probably work side by side. We will need a unyfied theoro for math and algorithmic study now...
what?
YOU ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO COMMENT if all you've read are the reviews. So please shut up until you read the book.
For only $45 from Amazon, A New Kind of Science is physically one of the best deals I've ever seen in a book. Its size is enormous (well over 1200 pages), and the quality of the paper, binding and printing process is extremely excellent, because the high resolution illustrations required it.
"Many of the pictures in this book have a rather different character from things that are normally printed. For unlike traditional diagrams consisting of separate visible elements -- or photographs involving smooth gradiations of color -- they often for example contain hundreds of cells per inch, each in effect independently black of white. And to capure this properly required careful sheet-fed printing on paper smooth enough to avoid significant spreading of ink." ... "The book was printed on 50-pound Finch VHF paper on a sheet-fed press. It was imaged directly to plates at 2400 dpi, with halftones rendered using a 175-line screen with round dots angled at 45 degrees. The binding was Smythe sewn."
Even if you never read this book and only use it as a paper weight or prop to pick up girls, it's still the highest quality paper weight or chick magnet you'll ever find for the money. If Springer-Verlag had published A New Kind of Science, it would probably cost at least $250, be printed on cheap K-Mart toilet paper, and they wouldn't have even considered putting a fresh ribbon in the typewriter.
If you do bother reading the book before trying to write a review or refute its contents by personally attacking the author, it will certainly change your view of the universe.
-Don
PS: Here's a dynamic cellular automata snowflake generator that I wrote a while ago, inspired by Margolis and Toffoli's "Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling" [MIT Press, 1987]:
AethOTron: http://www.DonHopkins.com/AethOTron
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
So have you ever heard of a widely-used product called MATHEMATICA?
Open the URL http://www.mathematica.com, notice where it redirects you to, learn about it, and see how laughably wrong and totally off-base you are in your accusations that Wolfram doesn't understand math.
Krapangor, I find it impossible to believe that you know much about math yourself, if you've never heard of Mathematica. But for you to say that Wolfram doesn't understand math -- that takes the cake! Ha ha ha!
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
This is from the index of Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science":
Lorentz, Hendrik A. (Netherlands, 1853-1928)
and relativity theory, 1041
Lorentz contraction, 1041
Lorentz gas, 1022
Lorentz transformations, 1041, 1042
Lorentzian spaces, 1051
From the notes for Chapter 9, refereing to Page 522, History of Relativity, on page 1041:
[Mentions Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Michelson, Morley, FitsGerald...] Already in 1904 Lorentz pointed out that Maxwell's equations are formally invariant under a so-called Lorentz transformation of space and time coordinates (see note below). [Mentions Einstein, Minkowski, Mach...]
Yet as I discussed earlier in the chapter, if a complete theory of physics is to be as simple as possible, then most things like relativity theory must in effect be derived from more basic features of the theory -- as I start to try to do in the main text of this section.
[End of quote from Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".]
How about reading the book before dismissing it by insulting all physicists?
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
We ingenious Americans drastically simplified the spelling of "mathematics" to "math", and then you meddling foreigners have to try and mess it up by tacking on letters that we took off for a damn good reason!
Nya nya nya!
I've heard it said many times before, but I'll say it again, because it's _so_ applicable to this book: what's true in the book is not new, and what is new in the book is not true.
It's funny you bring up the natural selection stuff. A few years ago I bought a book entitled "The Origins of Order" (by Kauffman) which is all about the role of self-organization in evolution and natural selection. It's just one more example of something that Wolfram doesn't seem to be aware of, something that if he hadn't locked himself in his room for 20 years and actually paid attention to other people he might have realized had been thought of already.
I have had such ambivalent reactions to this book. It could be such a great textbook, or introduction to the field, but the lack of editing and Wolfram's narcissism destroy it. A shame.
Written by S. Wolfram,
... we'll just have to wait and see.
... he is trying to drive a point home, and (thus far, I've only made it through chapter 7) is doing so in a time honored, rigorous fashion that is reminiscent of just about every theoretical mathematics, physics and engineering course I've taken.
Peer reviewed by noone,
Edited by S. Wolfram,
Published by S. Wolfram's company.
Well, Wolfram had a team of PhDs working under him, so it did go through some nomimal review and quite a rigorous check for accuracy. That is certainly comparable to the "peer review" that one sees in publishing scientific papers in scientific journals, and is arguably better than much of the "peer review" that takes place prior to such publications.
The real "peer review" will be that of other scientists now that his work is published. Can they replicate his results (almost certainly) and do the applications he outlined produce useful results to those working in the various fields of scientific inquiry his book touches upon. Quite possibly
I'm reading his book now, and it is quite fascinating. I disagree with the various calls for editors others have been making
Does that mean his conclusions are correct? No.
But it does set a very solid foundation for his thesis, and allow one to regard his theories in a solid context and an informed way, and, what is more, to understand them without first having become an expert in the field of CA.
He thinks he's discovered an overlooked tool for doing scientific analasys of systems which to date have defied calculus and other methods of analysis. He makes a compelling argument for why this is so, and provides ample data and information for anyone who is interested to duplicate and check his work.
He may not be correct, and his method of publishing may not have been within the channels the establishment generally prefers, but his publication itself appears to be in no way lacking in scientific rigorousness, and has certainly provided the detail and wherewithall for anyone to challenge it.
He may not be paying proper homage to those who came before him, or giving sufficient credit to those who have thought along similar lines (though he does cite other works and give due credit, so I'm not sure that criticism is even accurate), but his work, right or wrong, certainly appears scientifically valid. And if it is wrong, it will be rebutted quite thoroughly I'm sure, given the number of toes he has likely stepped on in persuing such a nontraditional course.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I made a little applet after I saw a article on Wolfram in a recent Wired. It does the cellular automata thing and the Rule 30 dealie. It is here: http://homepage.mac.com/beefyt/automata/
In answer to your question,
he is a brilliant self aggrandizer.
~ kjrose
Nope, I haven't read the tome yet.
But from the review and my previous
acquaintance with cellular automata, I can say this,
Mr. Wolfram confuses the model with
the real thing.
Attach a brush daubed with paint
on a cow's tail, and the flicking tail would
paint pretty pictures on a canvas.
Some of them may even look like
flowers, or grass, or birds hurtling
through the sky, or molten lava
churning in a lava dome.
The fact the pictures look
like what they look like doesn't mean
that's how those objects were created.
Mr Wolfram creates interesting patterns
with his cellular automatons. Now he
claims that cellular automatons are
the process through which nature creates
everything we see. He is arrogant in
his belief of his correctness,
he calls his theory a
``A New Kind of Science.''
Perhaps, I'll read the book someday.
But right now, I'm working on my new
theory of Cosmology. And it has something
to do with a flicking tail.
Preliminary note: I KNOW what I'm talking about. I have scientific training (but left the field).
Some people DO believe that peer review is about peer review. Nope. It's about editors not allowing publication of work they don't like or by people they don't like. Yes, the systems *does* prevent some shitty science from being published. It also prevents almost any revolutionary science from being published in major journal, and it's true, if you don't publish there, nobody gives a damm; and after you published it, you can't publish it again. So, if you try to publish is a major journal, you are blocked, if you publish it anyway, you are ignored, if you *don't* publish, you are called a charlatan.
Don't believe me? Check the history of science. And I don't mean Galileo, I mean the last BIG advances: kept in the `freezer' for 30 years.
No thanks, let the crackpots publish---*I* can read myself. *I* and not some God-Editor am the author's peer, my readers, and not the God-Editor, are my peers. If someone work is crap, I can tell myself (or is beyond my understanding), if my work is crap, my reader-peers can tell.
Nowadays, in ModernScienceTM, you can either have ideas or a career. (I'd rather have ideas---so I left.)
its all theory until put to the test. Models are fine, but if a model is correct, then it will work in the real world iteratively. Until then, its just voodoo and mental masturbation with funny symbols and flashy pictures. What Id like to see is CA work in REAL WORLD problems making actual predictions and allowing for new ways of controlling things, then we will see if this is as important as what he says.
"Arguably better" how? The "team of PhDs" were Wolfram's employees, and beholden to him. Real peer review means independent peer review, sans the conflict of interest inherent in checking the boss' work....
Which is a system functioning in a separate technology realm from industry and invention. I can't directly site the MIT study, but the result is effectively (my analogy) what's seen in child-development. Before the development of a set of social / communication skills small children will play adjacent to each other and rarely interact.
Neither of these systems (academia / industry) in practice holds the other in particularly high regard. In fact a small fraction (ca 1-5%) of engineers / scientists stay current with what's happening in 'that other area', these individuals, termed 'gatekeepers' are repsonsible for nearly all technology transfer.
the scientific system excludes certain types of claims ... it logically runs the risk of excluding the bona fide true revolutionary.... Yet in truth it does not seem to do that all that often.
I guess it depends on what you consider 'often' and 'revolutionary'. Lynn Margulis's discovery that Eukaryotic (all higher order life) cells resulted from the symbiotic relationship between prokariotic cells and viruses was actively derided in biology for a decade.
Scientists who choose not to live in the arena of academia, or corporate R&D are often the innovators who bring the most real innovations to light.
Examples:
- James Lovelock (inventor of gas-chromatograph tools, responsible for Gaia hypothesis and warning of te HCFC / Ozone problem)
- Itzak Bentov (one of 2 principal inventors of angioplasty and related less-invasive medicine one of the founders of Boston Scientific (now $2B+ sales)
- Stephen Wolfram
The common theme among these individuals is that they pursued new work in part outside of established doctrine, and to some extent this was precisely possible becuase they worked outside of 'peer review'Lovelock observed in his original book about Gaia that some kinds of research will never be taken on in academia (or the results of completed work will be rejected) because of purely social considerations. He cites the mis-evaluated concerns for safety in nuclear energy, comparing it to the actual (larger) magnitude of toxic chemical contamination risks.
For a similar example read (or google for) "Brain Sex", a summary of research documenting differences in male and female brain structure. Researchers in this field have uniformly found that because it is not 'PC' to observe that male and female cognigtion / brain structure exhibit meaningful differences, their (almost certainly valid) works are very slow to be funded or accepted.
These individuals and fields demonstrate how sometimes truly groundbreaking work can only happen outside of the established context. In these instances and many similar ones this happens when an individual can fund his(her) own work and therefor work outside of the peer review system of science.
Einstein's theories were nothing short of the demolition of... Newtonian worldview
Actually, Poincare noted the implications of both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics a couple of decades before Einstein applied the mathmatics necessary to fully illuminate the problem.
'Science' often believes the myth that it is an objective undertaking, not subject to whim or 'current fashion'. Most people who work very long in scientific fields discover that there are (wrong) articles of faith which become codified in 'the literature'. In fact 'Science' is a very human endeavour.
If peer review and scientific method alone were sufficient to accomplish all new work the examples above would not be true. They may be the exception, however they are clearly (IMHO) important exceptions.
Whether through introducing new understandings which would have otherwise been missed or effectively bringing new ideas and tools into the marketplace / policy, these are examples of where 'Science' as an institution comes up short.
None of which, by the way is intended to deny the validity of the various methods. 'Science' progresses through combinations of insight and hard work. Whether the hard work part is practiced to adhere to the rigors of peer review, or to bring an genuinely new idea to market in a form that works, the process is similar.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
I am not a physicist, I would never pretend to be one. But I am very very excited about the general level of discussion about this book. I am beginner level familiar with the terminologies and concepts that are being bounced around on the board about this topic and I have to say that I am overjoyed to hear people actually thinking about these things and coming up with points and counterpoints. Whether you like the book or not. I think stimulating minds to think in different directions is always a good thing.
"Arguably better" how? The "team of PhDs" were Wolfram's employees, and beholden to him. Real peer review means independent peer review, sans the conflict of interest inherent in checking the boss' work....
... review his work and check it in minute detail for accuracy, I would submit that, while such is possible, it is extremely unlikely and would be incredibly self-defeating (as he would then open himself up widely to public ridicule once his unchecked work was published).
Because one of the real weaknesses in the current scientific establishment is the orthodoxy that often plagues scientific publications, in which 'peer review' often amounts to a single colleague, sometimes for reasons more personal and political than scientific, prevents a work from ever seeing the wider light of day.
Peer review doesn't necessarilly have to occur prior to publication. Indeed, it is arguably better that work be published widely, and then either vindicated or rebutted publicly, rather than this happening in the quiet of a magazine's editorial office. That too is peer review (public acceptance or condemnation of a work, public vindiciaton or rebutting of its arguments, data, and/or interpretation), and that is precisely what Wolfram's work will be subjected to, now that it has been published.
It will either stand or fall on its own merits. Wolfram's team of PhDs provided sanity checks on his work, and as I understand it were given fairly wide latitude in pointing out any errors or inconsitencies that might have arisen. That is typically what the purpose of peer review prior to publication is supposed to accomplish, to insure that the work not have any glaring and emberrassing errors prior to publication.
Unfortunately it is often used as a means of enforcing orthodoxy, which is inappropriate and antithetical to what science is supposed to be about. History is repleat with scientific work that went unpublished for years, until the scientific orthodoxy in the discipline shifted and the work suddenly became "acceptable," despite having been chanced or "corrected" in no way whatsoever. Wolfram wisely avoided this nonsense entirely, and whether his theories turn out to be correct or not, they are sufficiently revolutionary that his approach was probably quite justified.
As for the insinuation that Wolfram would pressure his people not to do what he hired them to do
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
People usually use toilet paper to impress chicks. In fact, if you don't know how to impress chicks with toilet paper your genes will be removed from the gene pool very soon.
The story is monumentally pathetic. Self-proclaimed genius self-published a scientifically worthless book preceded by huge hype campaign lasting number of years.
m l). The editorial review is written in a distinct Wolfram's style. After making money on highjacked Mathematica he has enough resources for PR.
The author's resume (http://www.stephenwolfram.com/about-sw/) reads that he "was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech." In reality, he did not graduate any of these schools. He just declared that the professors are stupid and school boring and moved to a new place. He literally "had received his Ph.D. from Caltech." That was probably another joke of Feynman, whose attitude to academic bureaucracy was well known. There was no thesis written, no public defense.
Another excerpt from the resume reads: "he began the construction of SMP--the first modern computer algebra". In Wolfram's version of history thirty years of prior work on symbolic systems simply did not happen. There is, of course, no mention of other contributors such as Chris A. Cole, Geoffrey C. Fox, Jeffrey M. Greif, Eric D. Mjolsness, Larry J. Romans, Timothy Shaw, and Anthony E. Terrano. One of these authors described SMP as an expensive, full-scale industrial prototype of Mathematica. When Caltech claimed legal rights to the product, Wolfram left. He attempted to organize for himself an Institute for Complex Studies. He had to give up, because of lack of support for the idea. As a scientific discipline, Complex Systems were, due to Feynman's, neither mature nor substantial. Wolfram moved then to Urbana-Champaign to work on 'his' flag achievement Mathematica. The first edition of "Mathematica. A System for Doing Mathematica by Computer" lists the following authors: Stephen Wolfram, Daniel Grayson, Roman Maeder, Henry Cejtin, Theodore Gray, Stephen Omohudro, David Ballman, and Jerry Keiper." Only Wolfram survived to the second edition of the book. He owned the control package of the original company (It's name was Mathematica, I believe). He started Wolfram Research, Inc. and sold himself the products leaving behind his co-authors. Maybe someone tell me how he can possibly deserve the label "computer science genius."
A teenager publishing on theoretical physics, even if the results are not spectacular, even if his co-authors are well known experts, is, by definition, a genius. To preserve this image of he needed something special. He has chosen to write a book intended to wipe out from history of science all names except Wolfram and Newton, in that order. It did not go well. As Wolfram never went through scientific boot camp and did not conduct independent research, he lacks scientific maturity. Consequently, his publication is hopelessly weak. The book's main result can be summarized as 'one can use computer to imitate images occurring in nature' and "simple rules can lead to complicated-looking designs". That is nothing new, nothing spectacular. There in no predictive power, no answer 'why' things happen. This 'ground breaking achievement', similarly to his prior ones, was done by others. For about ten years, there was a group of young people at Wolfram Research, Inc. whose sole responsibility was writing the book. "A New Kind of Science" by Stephen Wolfram is not new nor science, nor by Wolfram.
How it can happen that such miserable persona can get so much undeserved publicity.
I overheard him saying that it requires only 15 grants to get an article about him written in a 'reputable' journal. That would explain how some shameless publications such as God, Stephen Wolfram, and Everything Else (http://www.forbes.com/asap/2000/1127/162.html) or A Man Who Would Shake Up Science (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/11/arts/11WOLF.ht
The first week the book was on the list of best sellers, but solely because of pre-orders, and the work of a special PR person hired by Wolfram. When more people began actually reading the book the number of negative reviews increased. It is possible fool some people for some time, but no one call fool all people forever.
Many of us bought the book hoping to see an elaboration of new ideas in a hot subject, not a ham-handed power grab of twenty year-old, well established ideas, with an unhealthy dose of vague sciencefictiony blue sky hypothesizing.
Play Command HQ online
Lorenz, Edward N. (USA, 1917-)
and chaos theory, 971
and complex ODE, 879
and experimental math, 899
and fluid turbulence, 998
in Preface, xiii
Lorenz Equations
as giving strange attractor, 922
and history of chaos theory, 971
and Lissajous figures, 917
and weather prediction, 1178
To recap, the original poster Krapangor said: "Do I even have to mention the Lorentz system at all, everyone should know it. But he is just a physicist after all. I'm a proud owner of a Mensa membership card."
So it's obvious that Wolfram is aware of the work of Lorenz as well as the work of Lorentz, since he cites both of them in the index, spells their names correctly, and discusses their work in his book.
It's also obvious that Krapagnor should tear up his Mensa card that he's so proud of, if he can't manage correctly spell the name he drops, claiming "everyone should know it".
Krapagnor: If everyone should know the "Lorentz" system, then why can't you even spell it correctly? You should tear up your Mensa card, and learn to spell before you dismiss all physicists as fools. And please read the book before attempting to discredit it by insulting the author.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Krapangor, for a guy with name that sounds like shit, you're quite a smooth operator yourself.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.