A New Kind of Science

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Summary: A new KIND of science = Philosophy
Review: A NEW KIND OF SCIENCE

There are, basically, 4 approaches to life and living. The mystical, the religious, the philosophical, and the scientific. This classification is based on the attitude one has towards asking questions and finding answers.

If one denies the relevance of both the asking of questions and the finding of answers, and tries to find guidance in one's own feelings, one is a mystic.

If one wants to base one's life on a system that is potentially able to answer all questions, one has a religious outlook. This is because the 'system' is 'holy', meaning that 'no further questioning is possible, and therefore allowed' (sacrilege) because the system either is a form of higher intelligence than the human one, or has its origins in a higher intelligence than the human one. We are too limited to question its base, according to the religious person, but nevertheless the system is supposed to be able to guide us. We must not have understanding of the system but faith in the system. That is why the asking of questions is not allowed up to a point, and the religious outlook is, basically, an enemy of asking questions.

If one denies the relevance of answers, and tries to base living on questions, then one is a philosopher. A philosopher is aware of the fact, that any answer can be turned into a question, and therefore he strives for 'as much an open mind as possible'. In fact, so much so, that he is, essentially, an enemy of answers.

If one accepts that answers can be found, but they are, by their very nature, limited in scope, and therefore there is always room for more questions and more questioning, one sees both the finding of answers and the capability of asking questions as relevant, and one is a scientist.

Now where does Stephen Wolfram fit? He is clearly no mystic, for he brings forward certain questions, and sees them as very relevant. He is definitely no religious person, either, because he clearly does not base himself on fait, but urges to investigate further.
But he is not a scientist either, for almost all of his book is just speculation. Therefore, I must conclude that he is a philosopher.

The basic task of a philosopher is not to provide answers, but to provide us with questions we have never contemplated before, and didn't even see to be relevant. His task is to define a problem area. A philosopher's task has been done, if he points out that there is a new problem area wherein many questions can be asked. It is the task of a philosopher to show, that the investigation of this new problem area can be worth while, not for academic research, but finding results can have lots of practical implications.

That Stephen Wolfram is a philosopher can already be seen at the title of his book. Not 'a new science', but 'a new KIND of science'. So he clearly states in his title, that he does not provide answers, but that he tries to make us aware of a new field of investigation, wherein many questions are waiting for an answer.

As such his book does a superb job. I have studied mathematics, physics, and programming. Maybe it is my ignorance, but the only thing I was aware of as a spin-off of computers was Chaos Theory, and Fractal Theory. I had heard about CA, but I thought the only 'game in town' was the 'game of life', which I just considered to be a curiosity. This book has made clear to me, that CA is much more than that. The book has many interesting things to tell to a philosopher. For example that Chaos Theory and Quantum Indeterminacy are not the only sources of indeterminacy to understand how free will is possible. You can also explain it from a simple program and computational irreducibility. Whether freedom actually is based on computational irreducibility is not the main concern of a philosopher. What Stephen Wolfram shows is that there is a third alternative to the conflict between free will and rules-based phenomena. This single result is, from a philosophical point of view, already enough to rank this book as a future classic on philosophy.

But for the rest I am in agreement with most people who consider the book to be disappointing. We all must be aware of the danger, that we are blind for our own ignorance. There is a psychological mechanism that whenever somebody is unconsciously incompetent, the 'blind spots' are filled with speculations that, because the person came up with them himself, become facts for him. Since they are unsupported facts, the only base of the acceptance is that YOU ARE SO CLEVER to come up with them in the first place, while others didn't. In other words, EGO!

Stephen is clearly not aware of this mechanism in him, making him pretend more than he can substantiate. If he just became aware of his status as being that of a philosopher, and did not confuse himself to be a scientist, his pretense would be in balance with the contents of what he says. But as matters stand now he can only disappoint.

My advice: read him as a philosopher. Use him to make yourself aware of more questions. But do not expect to find answers. That is up to us. Maybe Stephen Wolfram can be compared to David Hume or Immanuel Kant. It is a mistake to compare him with Newton, Einstein, Darwin and the likes. These were scientists, which Stephen clearly is not.

Rating:
Summary: Somebody get Wolfram some Pants
Review: This Book purports to a) Provide a new "meta-paradeigm" in which to build new theories of the world from quantum physics up thru the social sciences and b) be easily understandable to the Layman. It does neither.
I hold a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, and have had my fair share of study in the area of scientific philosophy as well as basic physics, chemistry, astronomy etc. I could not understand the writing in this book at all. In addition, it became clear that the author continued to state the same ideas over and over throughtout the chapters. He says nothing.
Clinical psychology has its' fair share of charlatans. Many clinicians often appear to think that if they do not understand the book or ideas, it is the fault of the reader, not the author. In addition, many decide that someone must be brilliant if their work in not understandable. That is wrong-headed.
Although the authors past work published in scientific & peer-reviewed journals clearly provides data for his intellectual gifts, I fear- after reading this book- for either his sanity or his ego.
In summary, this book is a piece of trash. I plan to give it to a friend as a gag gift this XMAS season.
The emperor wears no clothes. JWeinand, Ph.D.

Rating:
Summary: Grandiose but unsatisfying
Review: This is an elegantly designed yet arrogant and verbose volume. (As the reader is informed, writing the book took more than a hundred million keystrokes and more than "a hundred mouse miles.")

So far, in reading it I have found three propositions: (1) The author, Wolfram, is a genius; (2) Simple programs can produce complex results; (3) Mathematica can be used to produce interesting patterns that have elements of repetition but are not symmetrical.

The first of these propositions I leave to your own judgement (and that of history). The second is obviously true to any programmer. The third seems kind of trivial for the grandiose claims made.

Speaking of grandiose claims, I keep trying to find the "new kind of science" promised in the introduction (and the hype). Maybe I need to study it further, but I just don't see anything justifying the claims here.

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Summary: I'm amazed at the speed at which people read in the US
Review: It is interesting to note that the majority of people that have reviewed this book havn't read it. Hmmm... I suppose you found Wittgensteins Tractatus worthless and boring too.

I get the feeling that many of the so called physicists who have supplied opinions on this text are currently working in MacDonalds wondering what to do with their PhDs. If your gonna buy a book of this sort the least you could do is read it. Me thinks that many of you 'experts' out there are just too arrogant to admit that you didn't understand the points that Wolfram was trying to put accross. Perhaps you should stick to reading Superman comics and leave the important stuff to those of us who actually read books.

Rating:
Summary: Gorgeous, maddening, stimulating. And wrong.
Review: I can't believe I read the whole thing.

I'm a sucker for cellular automata, so the week ANKOS came out, I snapped it up, on the theory that even if Wolfram's revolution turned out to be a fizzle, I'd learn a lot of new twists on CA.

True enough. There's a pretty neat 400 page book here on CAs (and other discrete algorithmic systems in the same spirit - call them SASs, simple algorithmic systems, for short.) The remaining 796 pages are maddening (tedious, vainglorious, repetitious, handwaving) and fascinating by turns. It's peppered with intriguing projects, results, insights and conjectures. But Wolfram is so determined not to scare off the laymen with any display of rigorous definition or deduction that it's usually impossible to tell when he is just pontificating and when he actually knows how to cash out a given statement.

For example, after making 1-dimensional CAs the centerpiece for eight chapters, Wolfram begins to tackle physics, and acknowledges that CAs aren't the right tool for the job, because space and time (worse, a time which contradicts special relativity by requiring absolute simultaneity) are already built in. In a tour de force, he shows how there's a broad class of SASs involving self-generating networks, out of which something very much like space and time and causality, and special relativity, get constructed as a natural byproduct. This is terrific stuff. But then he can't really suggest where to go for the next step, other than brute search through the zillions of such SASs in hopes of hitting on one that generates real world physics.

There are at least two gaping holes in Wolfram's presentation, which he shrugs off far too lightly.

First: He acknowledges that it is extremely hard, given a set of constraints, to find an SAS that satisfies them, even when the constraints are simple. His moral: don't bother thinking about constraints. But out in the real world, it so happens that the realm of physics (both quantum mechanics and general relativity) does satisfy a complex and demanding set of constraints known as the principle of least action. Wolfram gives no reason for believing that an SAS satisfying such a complex constraint set will appear anytime in the first few billion, or the first few googol, of SASs studied. On the contrary, the rarity of 1-dimensional CAs satisfying the simple constraints he does examine strongly suggests the search for the New Kind of Physics will prove to be a wild goose chase.

Second: Thermodynamics, mathematical logic, and computer science have produced several sophisticated definitions for "complexity." Wolfram discusses them briefly - too briefly for the lay reader to get even a weak grasp on what they mean - and dismisses them in favor of his own "type 4" complexity, which is never more rigorously defined than "complex enough to produce pictures that look kind of like these." In chapter 11, he identifies this version of complexity with "universality", the ability of the system, if fed the proper initial conditions, to emulate a universal Turing machine. Astonishingly, he then asserts that all systems exhibiting "universality" - including such things as weather patterns and the vortices in a fast-draining tub - are essentially equivalent. He assumes that "ability to calculate x, given the right program" is the same as "ability to calculate x as fast as any other system, given the right program" - which is demonstrably false. And he assumes that "ability to calculate x, given the right program" is equivalent to "is as likely to calculate x in practice as any other system," which ignores the difference between human beings (who not infrequently calculate a long string of primes, because that's the sort of inputs they feed into their own system) and his rule 110 (which will never in a quadrillion years calculate a long string of primes unless a system more "complex" than itself deliberately sets it up with the right initial conditions.)

Because it fails so monumentally to deliver on its promises, I can't give the book more than 2 and a half stars. As a sourcebook for cool ideas on ways to build models and otherwise play with computers, though, it rates a 4. People will be drawing ideas from this book for a long time to come - or at least from the more reader-friendly books it will inspire. But science as a whole will not be noticably altered.

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Summary: Review of Wolfram, _A New Kind of Science_
Review: Review of Stephen Wolfram, _A New Kind of Science_

For three hundred years basic science has idealized mathematical models; this book at the very least makes a comprehensive and clear case for the advantages of the modern alternative: computational models. Probably nowhere else will you find such a clear exposition of the topic. The approach utilizes mainly cellular automata, which are fairly easy to understand and can emulate other computational systems. Hardly any of the central questions of science are untouched in this magnificent work, and the amazing thing is, it can be read and pondered by anyone. (Not in one day, though.)

Wolfram begins by developing the basic insights that (a) simple rules can produce systems of great complexity, even of the greatest complexity, which is apparent randomness; and that (b) complexity in systems comes in recurring types which tend to be surprisingly independent of the nature of the systems. From this, after a grand tour of crystal growth, plants and animals, fluid dynamics, financial systems, fundamental physics, cosmology, human perception and analysis, and much else, we arrive at a lengthy discussion of the nature of computation, and finally at Wolfram's grand summation: the Principle of Computational Equivalence. It is this principle that the author believes will eventually revolutionize science.

There is no question that the work is ambitious. Critics of the "Age of Science" often hit hardest at its weakness for speculating beyond the data actually available to the sciences. But there is another level of conjecture, namely, speculation about the future development of science itself, perhaps beyond current understanding of the nature of science. This phenomenon, which might be called metaconjecture, we encounter in its pure form on p. 545 of ANKOS, just about in the middle of the book: to derive all the results of quantum theory from computational models "will certainly take an immense amount of work" but Wolfram believes strongly "that in the end it will turn out that every detail of our universe does indeed follow rules that can be represented by a very simple program-and that everything we see will ultimately emerge just from running this program."

There are ways in which this book is a major contribution to the philosophy of science even if the author has exaggerated the significance of his ideas. For one thing, one sees very often in science that weaknesses of a well-established approach are discussed openly only when a new approach is being offered. This book sheds light on the nature of traditional science done almost exclusively in terms of mathematical equations, by contrasting this with his approach of looking at computational models using simple rules (Chapters 1-5). (The issue becomes especially clear at p. 474, where the nature of space is being discussed. Continua such as are presupposed by traditional mathematics do not in general yield the complex behavior Wolfram finds interesting: complex behavior does not emerge from continua.) The book also very usefully discusses the nature of randomness (Chapter 6), the nature of systems based on the satisfaction of constraints as opposed to those based on rules (Chapter 7), and the nature of scientific models (Chapter 8).

One may be puzzled at all the attention given to shapes of leaves and branches, configurations of mollusk shells, pigmentation patterns-until one realizes that traditional science has not been able to say much of anything about them at all! Wolfram chides biologists for the ingenuity they show in trying to explain such things in terms of natural selection; for him, they have developed in spite of, not because of, natural selection. (Wolfram's ideas about the life sciences are perhaps the most interesting in the book.)

I especially liked Wolfram's discussion of entropy. It is often pointed out that the development of life (let alone human life) appears to defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is that all things tend to randomness. But we are always told that while the law holds in general, it may be countered locally. The whole matter appears especially clear when discussed in terms of cellular automata. Why does the Second Law of Thermodynamics appear to hold? For Wolfram it is a result of the following proposition: "No reasonable experiment can ever involve setting up the kind of initial conditions that will lead to decreases in randomness, and... therefore all practical experiments will tend to show only increases in randomness." A reasonable experiment is one in which the process of setting up the experiment is simpler than the process which the experiment is intended to observe (p. 444). So does the law hold? Not really. Systems are quite possible to construct which decrease entropy, e.g. rule 122R with very elaborate initial conditions (p. 443). Rule 37R does not obey the Second Law. Somehow, in such a system, "kinds of membranes form between different regions of the system, and within each region orderly behavior will then occur, at least while the membrane survives." (p. 455) Wolfram drops the discussion there, but he would be the first to admit: "membranes" are, so far at least, just a label for what happens.

Listen to this remark about time (from p. 484):
"Should we really imagine that the complete spacetime history of the universe somehow always exists, and that as time progresses, we are merely exploring different parts of it? Or should we instead think that the universe-more like systems such as cellular automata-explicitly evolves in time, so that at each moment a new state of the universe is in effect created, and the old one is lost?
Models based on traditional mathematical equations-in which space and time appear just as abstract symbolic variables-have never had to make much distinction between these two views. But in trying to understand the ultimate underlying mechanisms of the universe, I believe that one must inevitably distinguish between these views.
And I strongly believe that the second view is the one most likely to provide a meaningful underlying model for our universe."
(That's Aristotelian by the way.)

I recommend the book heartily to anyone interested in the nature of science. Despite what one hears it is not overly long, because only 846 pp. are text, the rest being notes; and it is not expensive because his own company published it.

Rating:
Summary: Science
Review: For a reader interested in science the book will be
disappointing The words "I" and "my" apear too frequently in
the text. If you are able to skip pages the book can be entertaining.
The book is a MUST for wallpaper designers

Rating:
Summary: A New Kind of Ego
Review: Sterile. Egomaniacal. Utterly without merit.

Rating:
Summary: I feel sorry for Wolfram !!!
Review: While in grad school working on my physics PhD one of my friends went mad, literally !!! It was a slow process, he started acting increasingly weirdly, became very egocentric, and started producing 'theories' that attempted to explain everything but that were basically non-sense. Reading Wolfram's book I had flash-back and I remembered my friend: the same non-sensical rambling presented as 'science'. I wouldn't be surprised if Wolfram is diagnosed with paranoia in the next few years !!

Rating:
Summary: Not "New" and not "Science"
Review: This is a hugely disappointing book !!! I had waited for months for it to come out, being a physicist myself and a fan of Wolfram's previous work, however when I started reading it I couldn't believe how superficial, trivial and Wolfram-centered it was. There's nothing fundamentaly new in this book, cellular automata are not invented by Wolfram, just search on the web for "The Game of Life", it was huge in the '70s. There's no 'science' in the book either, just fancy rambling. In all honesty, I think Wolfram went mad ... Very, very sad ...