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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.
Painful as it was, I read most of the book just to make sure I wasn't missing anything. The truth is that he hasn't had a useful idea in the past 15 years. The rest of it is either just wanking, like his speculations on how the laws of physics could be generated by a CA - pure speculation with no way of using his ideas to solve any real problems. Other times he's just plain wrong, such as his idea that natural selection is not the cause of life complexity.
His reasoning is pretty flimsy going something like this:
I'm going to be sick. I'm glad I returned it, and please don't get me started on the notes!
Of course it's possible. It's also possible that he's a complete crackpot who, by dint of owning a publishing company, gets to blare his name across the ether.
Luckily, after millenia of history and centuries of struggle, we've managed to evolve a system that -- much more often than not -- functions to separate the truly original and productive thinker from the truly original and marginal nutcase. It's a system that, amazingly, allows us to make confident statements about things of which we cannot have direct knowledge and that provides relatively surefire ways to establish tests to enhance that confidence.
That system of course is the system of peer review matched with rigorous experiment, coupled to independent replication of significant results.
Since the scientific system excludes certain types of claims and certain ways of making 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. If a result is radical and useful, it eventually works its way into the community. Einstein's theories were nothing short of the demolition of the prevailing, overwhelmingly successful Newtonian worldview. But he made that revolution within the system, and the system accommodated it.
Too few people appreciate the astounding success and use that follows from a simple, oft-misunderstood fact: Science is not about "discovering truth". It's about quantifying ingorance
In science we don't know all that much, compared to the vast possibilities of the Universe. But what we know, we know well.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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
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