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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."
I've been to a lecture by Wolfram and it was disappointingly low-level. He touched on many interesting subjects but unfortunately didn't delve deep enough to make the lecture really very worthwhile. All in all it seemed like a marketing gimmic to sell his book and software.
The only good part about the whole thing was the completely misguided people asking him truly bizarre questions at the end of the lecture. It was really amusing to see him struggle to answer some truly retarded questions.
Prof. Eugene Wigner said it best in his evaluation of a Professor giving a talk at Princeton: "Well Sir that talk was certainly New and Interesting, however what was New is not Interesting and what was Interesting was not New." I think that certainly applies to this book.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
He may be a smart guy, but I think he might just be recycling old material and calling it the Next Big Thing (TM). Again, I won't find out unless this book catches on, because most of my book purchases are by word of mouth or by trusted source (sorry, Slashdot, you do not fit into this category), and if it's going to get to me and my small circle of friends and acquiantences, it had better start selling.
But good luck to the guy. At least he's writing a book, rather than writing all of his prose in Slashdot comments!
Props to Wolfram for this, but it looks like clever marketing- as far as I can tell, you can't, say, download a pdf of a chapter; you pretty much have to go page by page. So on a practical level, it's a big ad.
Also, you need Mathematica to run the programs.
So, if you get hooked by the online text, Wolfram can count on 1 book sale, and maybe 1 Mathematica license (if, like me, you don't study/work somewhere with a site license).
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
As someone who owns and has read that book, I say it was definitly worth the money even if it was just a collection of other people's work. The point is ANKOS complete and insightfull. It actually says something specific, which is more then we can say about plenty of books hailed by the noobs. I think the man deserves some compensation for the work put forth even if it was only collecting and copywriting he saved me from a long journey to learn from his insights.
Anyone who is a visitor of Wolfram MathWorld or ScienceWorld will recognize the invaluable contribution that Wolfram has made to the scientific community. From a personal perspective without MathWorld sometimes I would be completely lost...
And if I recall correctly, he received his Ph.D. without ever attending any classes, because the quality of his frequent papers was so high that Caltech risked embarrassment that another university might snap him up and grant him a Ph.D. first.
Whatever this "new kind of science" turns out to be, the guy is an indisputable example of rare genius.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I say, RTFB (Book). What!? You haven't? It's too damn big? Well go read it and THEN come back and complain.
On the other hand, I think that people's attitude toward his work is not a problem of the merit of the his work. Rather, it is the way he seemed so self-important when pointing out something that seems deceptively simple that many people have covered before (Cellular Automata).
The universe is not governed by vastly complicated equations wrought by the human mind. And Wolfram pointing that out simply offended people who believed otherwise.
That's the book that was described by one researcher as: "A rare blend of monster raving egomania and utter batshit insanity" which when I first read it made me laugh out loud. I haven't read the book so I don't know how accurate it is.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
I often look to Anonymous Cowards for respected peer review.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
By comparison, Wolfram is just a bored dilletante scribbling on the back of an envelope.
:)
And you the mighty gowen have contributed so much to society. Wolfram is indeed a genius.He is up there with the likes of Stephen Hawking, just in a different field. He did build some of his work off of other people's, but that is what science is. Modern Physics was built off of Newton's work which was then in turn added to by others until it has reached its amazing point in this day and age where we can send a small robot to a crater on a planet millions of miles away. Quantum Mechanics is also commonly contributed to Albert Einstein who's work was then contributed to by others. But before Einstein there was Max Planck. The reason the human race has progressed as such is because we learn from our predecessors and build on that knowledge. Yes Wolfram used a lot of work based on others (and he cites it all), but he has also studied Cellular Automata for somewhere between 12 to 20 years.The guy is smart and I've read this entire book cover to cover and have referenced it several times. He makes insights into the field that no one has ever mentioned before. And after hearing him speak at one of his conferences in New York I have the upmost respect for him and his brilliance. If you still don't believe me, read the book, or just go to his website and browse it. Even better, try to duplicate Mathematica and see how far you get.I'm not trying to start a flame or anythign like that, but unless you are really familar with this guy then you can't really comment. I've followed his works for at least 5 years now.
Regards,
Steve
P.S. Another guy worth checking out who is affiliated with Wolfram is Eric Weisstein who has a great website and sells an encyclopedia for mathematics, which I also own and couldn't live without
Yes Wolfram used a lot of work based on others (and he cites it all)
and:
In the 1990's Matthew Cook served as a research assistant to Stephen Wolfram , where among other things he was directed to develop a proof showing that the Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing-complete . Under non-disclosure until the publication of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, Cook nevertheless presented his proof at a Santa Fe Institute conference. Subsequently, it was stricken from the published proceedings by court order. Rule 110 is an extremely simple system, and the fact that it is Turing-complete is remarkable. While some view the proof as the book's central contribution, it is notable that in the years between Cook's presentation and the book's final publication, no subsequent follow-on work was done by those who had seen or heard of the proof-likely because its significance was not clear outside of the intellectual structure for which it was developed.
(from wikipedia:Matthew_Cook)
So, it's weasels all the way down?
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Evidently he does not, for many have accused Dr. Wolfram of plagiarism. Personally, I find his citations inadequate. He doesn't give nearly enough credit to Edward Fredkin or Tommaso Toffoli or any of the other key researchers in Cellular Automata who advanced the idea that the universe is a giant computational process long before this book was ever published.
Wolfram claims to have originated this idea, and he seems hell-bent on taking the credit away from others, to the point that he's put some rather onerous copyright restrictions on his NKS book and website. This is academically dishonest, to say the least.
That he fucked over his own research assistant, Matthew Cook, is a crime against the advancement of math and science. (Check the Wikipedia article on Matthew Cook. It's enlightening.)
I myself did some work with using Cellular Automata to model physical systems -- my bachelor's thesis (submitted in 1992 to the MIT Physics Department) concentrated on modeling gas diffusion using a one-dimensional CA, and comparing the results against statistical physics theory. Wolfram came late to the party, claims ownership of ideas that rightfully don't belong to any one person (and which he definitely did not originate), and killed a lot of trees to disseminate relatively little new information (the proof that a specific CA is Turing complete, furnished by his research assistant, being the primary noteworthy item). Save yourself the money and the 1200+ pages and read the source material. It's more enlightening.