Wolfram's New Kind of Science Now Online

gotscheme writes "When Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame self-published A New Kind of Science in 2002, he raised the suspicions of many in scientific communities that he was taking advantage of a lot of other people's work for his sole financial gain and that he was going against the open nature of academia by using restrictive copyright. Yesterday, Wolfram and company released the entire contents of NKS for free on the Web (short registration required). Perhaps Wolfram is giving back to the scientific community; perhaps it is simply clever marketing for a framework that is beginning to gain momentum. For any matter, the entire encyclopedic volume is online, and this appears to be a positive step for scientific writing."

Comments

New Kind of Hype?

[corebreech]

The idea that the universe is the product of the combinatorial effects of different combinations of events seems neither unique nor unexpected.

I know this will probably be modded as a troll, but could it be that NKS is nothing more than a computer-science primer for physicists?

Re:New Kind of Hype?

[scrytch]

Penrose's spinor group has been working on similar foundations for 30 years, and they've actually produced some interesting results

Is Penrose still blathering about how human minds are somehow magically transcendant due to quantum bogodynamic handwaving, and therefore not subject to any form of simulation? I really just couldn't hold any respect for him after reading The Emperor's New Mind, which is too bad since it's one of those "tour de force" books ala hofstadter that's actually educational unlike hofstadter and his stupid little achilles tortoise whatever and their wordgames...

I'm terrible with math, really, so I can't get myself into "real" science (when penrose started going into tensor calculus, i sort of went flipflipflip next chapter), but I do enjoy those laymans science books. Any you might recommend?

So What's the Deal?

[StormyMonday]

A cellular automaton is simply a description of a discrete differential equation. Since physical laws are described in terms of differential equations to start with, it's not surprising that a cellular automaton can model a physical process.

So what's the deal? Outside of Wolfram's ego, of course.

Wolfram is the new Einstein?

[Kardamon]

Wolfram probebly thought he could do the same trick with celular automata as Einstein with the theory of relativity: rewrite a lot of stuff without references and everybody will believe it is original and a work of genius?

Re:thinking this is crap?

[mgessner]

Look, Dr Wolfram, that's all very nice.
But when you post on slashdot, would you please use your real name?
kthx