I am not qualified to have an opinion about Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. I’ve read it 1.75 times just to confirm this fact. I can’t evaluate the claims about how much of what he says is new, but I also sort of don’t care, except in a gossip-y sort of way. So why am I interested?

First, since I was in high school I’ve been bothered by the notion of laws. It’s a metaphor that scientists immediately reject: there’s no governing body, there’s no jail time for miscreants. So, then it’s just regularities and correlations. But that’s not much of an explanation. Wolfram tries to explain phenomena by asking what’s the simplest computer program that could have generated it. I don’t know that that is any more of an explanation, but it’s at least a radically different type of explanation. One indication of its radicalness: some phenomena cannot be predicted by solving an equation but only by running the program.

I like the fact that his approach holds hope (but I can’t evaluate how much) for understanding complex phenomena. Traditional science often punks out there. I asked a physicist friend of mine about this, a guy who was in grad school with Wolfram btw, and he said that the structure of heavy atoms is too complex to be managed — so far — by our equations. So, here’s exactly the sort of problem that Kuhn pointed to, a limit against which the current paradigm bumps. And it’s not in some marginal area. Complexity is clearly hugely important, from snowflakes to brains to galaxies. Wolfram may have (I can’t tell) made progress in understanding how complexity can be generated from very simple rules.

I’m also interested in watching the scientific community’s reaction to it. Will it embrace or reject (or take a third path) this? Likewise, will there be sufficient application of Wolfram’s ideas to recalcitrant existing problems to establish it as a workable paradigm? Fascinating.

And I’m very interested in his metaphysics because it seems to be the apotheosis of a modern trend: the triumph of formalism. The discussion in the comments section of my blog recently about Kurzweil and Searle typifies the deep division in our thought. Many of us find it obvious that the brain is hardware running software, and thus we will be able to move the software into another medium and run it losslessly, just like we can move our copy Sim City and our saved games from one computer to another. But this seems to me to be so fundamentally wrong, for reasons I won’t discuss again here. Wolfram takes the brain-as-software idea to its ultimate extension: the universe is software. His books attempts to derive space, time and the fundamental particles of physics from purely formal considerations. Wow.

He’s also an excellent writer and a truly interesting character. I’ve had the opportunity to spend a little time with him, and I like him.

Although I’m frustrated by my inability to follow his argument past page 500 or so, I also think there’s a certain benefit to being forced into agnosticism about his content, for the questions that circle “Is he right?” are fascinating on their own.

Categories: misc dw