Rating: 
Summary: Too dumb to be dangerous?
Review: No offense, but is the erstwhile five lines of Mathematica code running itself? Rupa! Arupa! Allez oops!
Rating: 
Summary: interesting ideas, but hastily written
Review: Stephen Wolfram's new book has some interesting ideas, but it seems hastily written. I would much prefer a 25 year effort.
Rating: 
Summary: New Kind of Science is delivered by...
Review: I have been (and still am) a big fan of Wolfram's work on cellular automata. It lead to many applications in different fields, from pattern formation to computation, and Wolfram is quick to point them out. He moved on to become a successful entrepreneur, developing Mathematica. I used to use his software daily, but never matched his mastery: I admire with great envy the breathtaking illustrations in the book. I am very receptive to Wolfram's message: cellular automata to everybody. He makes a good point: despite its high promise, cellular automata never lead to any deep understanding of nature. His frustration with this outcome of the field he has helped create is justified. So he worked for 20 years to get things right. Did he succeed? Yes and no. The book is based on a simple premise: that simple algorithms (read: cellular automata) can reproduce the patterns of nature. This is not different from the point made in Gleick's Chaos, and many other books have been written about pattern formation since- without the claim of a new science. Yet, Wolfram did succeed writing the book that will be keep many talking, and will surely make most best seller lists. The book is dense in details, and even denser in spectacular graphics. But it fails short of its goal: to convince us that there is new science over here. I am deeply saddened by this-- I was hoping that the hype he has created by promoting it as a "landmark in the history of science" will deliver at least a fraction of that. The claim that most patterns in nature can be reduced to simple rules, that inevitably lead to complex outcomes, is an old song. That the complexity of these problems is comparable is an idea that goes back to Turing. The media hype draw me to Wolfram's book, and I followed Amazon's recommendation and ordered Barabasi's Linked: The new science of
networks. I found that the promised 'new kind of science' is indeed delivered by ... Linked. Barabasi's message is simple: all complex systems hide networks. As networks are everywhere, we have to pay attention to them. The Internet, six degrees of separation, Hollywood, the cell and the sex network (!) all follow the same rules, a rich gets richer one, that creates hubs, like the airline hubs, and scale-free networks. Paul Erds, Kevin Bacon, Vernon Jordan, and Wild Chamberlain are such 'hubs' in different networks. Reading Barabsi's arguments you slowly realise that Wolfram is searching in the wrong place for the thruth about complexity. If Wolfram gets you with his extraordinary claims, Barabasi will grab you with the depth of some of the discoveries he describes and his page turning style.
Rating:
Summary: A Power in Simplicity, But not Matter
Review: Wolfram's magnum opus is extremely brilliant and absolutely fascinating. Or at least I can say this about the parts of the book which seem to interest me the most: the Notes, in 349 pages of (overly) small print, and the invaluable Index, as well as certain figures. The Notes remind me not a little of the unique sweep and precision of the eminent physicist John Archibald Wheeler in his books, perhaps because of the sheer energy and power of their minds, and the overspreading play of their ideas and interests. The rest of the volume, or main text, has the virtue of simplicity, and is essential as an overview of the author's research and "new science", and for its explanations and direct assertions, but it is on the whole of inferior interest and value. Even if Wolfram's key beliefs, those which underlie his system, should turn out to be wrong, his book will long remain what it is now: enormously challenging, useful, and informative, and a masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship and universal thought and creativity. The main value of his methods and system, I believe, is in their correction of certain inexcusable neglects in theoretical and experimental physics, and science generally. The argument of the book, however, exaggerates the absolute importance of these methods and principles, and of certain kinds of natural phenomena and behavior; and, in a cardinal error, it mistakes them for physical reality itself. Ironically, however, Wolfram has not sufficiently generalized his ideas, for they can be put in a still higher, or given a more fundamental, form, and extended to a larger class of related things. He has wrongly grasped and praised the mere tail of a great animal, of which science itself, until now, has held a shank. ... On the other hand, it is very unhealthy to stay up all night, as Wolfram describes himself as doing, in his monologic book. For one thing, it can blight one's view of mankind on topside. For another, if I may speak here as a neuroscientist, it can warp one's judgment, or ability to distinguish between reality and a fantasy, a thing in one's mind and that greater thing - that most stubborn fact - which is the world itself. Cellular automata are so simple that they can suggest everything in nothing, and act as a powerful generator of illusions, particularly because of their novelty of form and behavior. The physicist who is first confronted with the mechanism of life must be knocked head over heels in a fool's amazement. And Stephen Wolfram suffered, and clearly suffers even now, from the additional, most grievous and unkind, disadvantage of having been an infant prodigy. There is power in simplicity, but not matter. Cellular automata may be a valuable new formalizing tool in physics, added to mathematics, but I would bet all the world that they are not the world.
Rating: 
Summary: If a million scientists worked on a million experiments ...
Review: If a million scientists worked on a million experiments for three hundred years, would they learn as much about the universe as Stephen Wolfram does by sitting at his computer for twenty years? Apparently not, according to Stephen Wolfram. I'm annoyed with Wolfram for forcing me to poke fun at him like this. I've been waiting for this book a long time, and I genuinely wanted to give it a thumbs up. Unfortunately, Wolfram has made that impossible. I gave the book three stars, but in fact I consider it almost un-ratable. What do you do with a 1200-page tome that contains a wealth of substantive and fascinating results, but which is insists, at every turn, to draw over-blown and under-supported conclusions from them? I split the difference and gave it a middling rating, but that does not convey the deep ambivalence I feel toward this work. Given Wolfram's reputation, I expected a certain amount of hubris, and even looked forward to it. Most scientists work hard to suppress the egotism that drives them, but Wolfram's ego is out there in the open. While this can be refreshing, what I found here left me dumbfounded. For Wolfram, all of scientific history is either prelude or footnote to his own work on 1-D cellular automata. On pages 12-16 he breezily sites other work in chaos theory, non-linear dynamics and complexity theory. At the end of the book, there are hundreds of pages of footnotes describing previous history as essentially one damn thing after another - a testament to all the people that didn't see the promised land, as he has. Wolfram attempts to usurp all credit for the "computational perspective." Assertions such as "the discoveries in this book showing that simple rules can lead to complex behavior" are repeated to the point of exhaustion. But his attempt to shock us falls flat: if that idea was ever radical, it surely would not be considered so today. The other fields that Wolfram casually dismisses have provided strong indications of the power of this principle, as well as the idea that many diverse systems are computationally equivalent. An entire generation of physicists has grown up quite accustom to these notions. Wolfram did make very substantial and important contributions to the study of complex systems in the early eighties. But he was not the only one, and those studies have not induced a wholesale revision of science. Despite what he would have us believe, the general concepts he espouses are not that radical. It would probably be more accurate to call them expressions of the modern scientific zeitgeist. Meanwhile, some of Wolfram's specific claims are indeed very novel, but only because they are breathtakingly arrogant. Consider his comments on two famous scientific principles: The second law of thermodynamics, and evolution by means of natural selection. Both these principles date from the mid-nineteenth century. Both have incited considerable controversy, and both have withstood mountains of empirical observations from diverse sources. Wolfram, however, calls both of them into question. Why? Because he has done 1-D cellular automations simulations on his computer that he feels make them suspicious. How does Wolfram expect to be taken seriously when he makes such assertions almost non-chalantly? Wolfram lacks any hint of balance in assessing the true place of his results. He admits to having been a recluse for years, and it shows. The desire to free oneself of the mainstream community, to allow oneself to be more creative, is understandable and healthy. But one concomitantly loses the critical faculty that derives from being part of a dynamic community. Though Wolfram will likely never see it, what he lost by pulling away from the world has substantially outweighed what he gained. Consequently, his loss has become ours. We did not get the much shorter, but wiser, book that lurks somewhere inside this one.
Rating:
Summary: JUST WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR!
Review: Hey, this is it, the ultimate science book for the lay person! I understood every single word of it, and was reeeeeally proud I did. The nonmathematical automata proofs are simply astounding, with all their noncellular asynthetic operativeness, made simple by the down-to-earth lingo, especially when Wolfram expands on the biological systems and their vast hydrostatic continuum. I found the book highly enjoyable, at times even laughing out loud, due to the subtle sarcasm of the genial author. The multiplicity of orbital angular momenta, in analysing the individual electron, was truly sharp: when voltage V is applied across the terminals, you get a terrific R=V/i-r and the resistance goes to moving the coils of your intestine with a full scale deflection that brings them to "r" ohms. Isn't that super? Just read the book, you won't be disappointed. But remember: a decrease in the amplitude of an oscillation is the result of energy being drained from the oscillating system to overcome frictional resistive forces in the Universe---this should serve as your ideal for a happy life.
Rating:
Summary: word of warning...
Review: Check the publication date of this 1,200 pg. book before you take the above reviews seriously.
Rating:
Summary: Good
Review: This is a long book that deserves a lot of consideration before copious review process.
Rating:
Summary: copy-right
Review: The intention of the book is to raise just about as many questions as science has managed to answer to date, while it offers the new means to probe in those new directions. As an aside, it is interesting to note that the author has copyrighted the rules and non-trivial initial conditions of cellular automata discovered in the book. If the New Kind of Science is of value, then these rules and initial conditions are likely to include the rules of our universe...
Rating:
Summary: A dizzying tour of natural law in rose-colored glasses
Review: Since the 16th century, science has attempted to explain reality by the expression of a few immutable laws that seemingly govern their behavior. Newton's laws. Maxwell's equations. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Things behaved in a certain way because the law was embedded into them. This point of view is the expression of Christian reductionism (In the beginning was the word.....), that within the seemingly sinful random behavior of real things, that there was an expression of some deeper reality. If the hybridization of red and white sweet peas didn't result in 25% of their offspring being red, but rather 23% or 28%, it didn't matter - the principle of an autosomal recessive trait was the same, and the genetic truth was in itself unchanging. Wolfram turns science on its ear by demonstrating how reality is in some way an expression of the chaos embedded in all behaviors. Perturb some supersymmetry, and all reality is generated. The behavior of nuclei and stars, the leaf of a maple tree, the behavior of socieites. Tweak the void with a tiny change, and like a dinner-bell, voila! all reality is served up. This book is not for the faint of heart, but just about every page is provocative. One will find much to consider, and, like the good meal alluded above, digestion will take far longer than the eating. A tour of Wolfram's software child, Mathematica may help this sometimes baffling reexpression of all science, but is not necessary. Like listening to Beethoven, in which a degree in music appreciation is unnecessary but helpful, formal mathematics opens the door of Wolfram's work a reality unavailable without it, but is in no way necessary to see the beauty of his approach. In the end, the effort of reading it is well worth it, and the hyperbole "Life changing" may not be out of order.
|
