A New Kind of Science

Rating:
Summary: Tooo heavy !
Review: I noticed a description of this book in Discover magazine.
I will admit openly, I did not read it. I think many people have not. Who would have a time to do it and for what reason?
Out of curiosity, I glanced through it for a while in a book store - what a mammoth edition!
I liked pictures and the way it is published (print is very small though and eyes get tired quickly).
That is why I give my rating here. However if you have a low back problem and cannot lift heavy objects, do not buy it! Just go to the book store and look at it, like in the museum - at the piece of art.

Rating:
Summary: A great book with practical applications
Review: A great book that explains how the Universe came to being. If a single thought created our Universe, certainly the thought did not take 5 days to complete. A single and simple event can, over time produce profound effects. While physicists are still trying to figure out how a simple program can lead to such complexity due to the immense time involved in the iteration phase - the more practical application of the book is in business of managing complexity.

Personally, I have been designing Business Intelligence and Decision Support systems to improve Business Agility for many years. The book provides the fundamental insight to observed effects in global economy and has helped me to focus on specific architecture of businesses to enhance agility from adaptive demand forecasting to strategic enterprise management. I am sure the book can illuminate the path to new drug discovery, gene manipulation or anti-terrorism systems too.

I highly recommend the book to those who are designing or solving highly complex co-dependent, multi-variate, time-series systems or issues.

Rating:
Summary: Closer to the essentials of nature
Review: Stephen Wolfram's A NEW KIND OF SCIENCE is a very interesting book, which shows amazing relations between far different objects and phenomena. For the puzzling origin of these relations you may see also Eugene Savov's THEORY OF INTERACTION The Simplest Explanation of Everything. The theory of interaction digs deeper into the basics of nature than any current understanding. The deeper basic knowledge improves all practical skills and so makes these two basic books a must for the library of everybody.

Rating:
Summary: psycoanalytical pseudo-poseur
Review: Must be tough to supposedly be that smart...any never really come up with anything new. This book and premise ain't it either....terrible nonsense.

Rating:
Summary: A New Kind of Science?
Review: Is computation theory (which Wolfram doesn't treat in all its richness) an important and exciting strand in understanding the fabric of reality? Of course! But so are the theory of evolution, the theory of knowledge (epistemology or the scientific method), and quantum theory.

Computation theory, like the theory of evolution, the theory of knowledge, and quantum theory, are not "sciences" in and of themselves, but transcending principles. They have been abstracted out of the sciences in which they were originally discovered, and applied broadly so that they clarify our understanding of many different scientific disciplines.

I feel that Wolfram mistitles his book by calling its contents a new "science." In my opinion, all the book actually does is to extol the long-recognized value of applying computation theory to many different problems in the sciences.

For a better read about the "new kind of science," try David Deutsch' "The Fabric of Reality". Deutsch, a winner of the Paul Dirac Medal, posits that the four theories listed above (evolution, computation, epistemology, and quantum) may be the most important strands of a gradually emerging "theory of everything." Check out the reviews on that book!

Rating:
Summary: The "new" science is 35 years old
Review: Of course it was not Wolfram but Konrad Zuse himself, inventor of the
first working programmable computer (1935-1941), who was the first to
suggest that the physical universe is being computed on a giant computer,
presumably a cellular automaton (CA). His first article on this topic
dates back to 1967 (in Elektronische Datenverarbeitung, pages 336-344,
vol 8). And Zuse's full-fledged book on CA-based universes came out
2 years later: Rechnender Raum, Schriften zur Datenverarbeitung,
Band 1, Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig 1969.

Wolfram's book briefly mentions Zuse in the notes, but unfortunately
does not discuss his work in any satisfactory way. I guess an honest
title for his book would be something like: "More on Zuse's thesis."
An honest abstract would be something like: "In the 1960s Zuse proposed
that the universe and everything is the result of a dicrete computational
process running on a cellular automaton. Here I try to extend Zuse's
thesis as follows: 1).. 2).. 3).."

So far I have not found anything but minor extensions of Zuse's "new"
1967 science, and none of the expert reviewers (search for "Wolfram
reviews" on the web) has found anything real new either - since the
early 2002 marketing blitz the reviews have shown a tendency of becoming
both more competent and less favorable. The popular press interviews
focus on the "universe as a computer" idea - but neither there nor in
the book's main text Wolfram does anything to correct the wrong
impression it's all his idea, not Zuse's. But hey, the scientific
truth finding process will be stronger than any misleading
marketing efforts.

Nice pictures though. I give it two stars.

Rating:
Summary: The Fundamental Question
Review: As much as I'll like to comment about the personality behind the book, I'll rather stick to the fundamental question: Wolfram claims that with his method virtually all underpinings of nature can be unravelled. I'm afraid his assertions did not even come close to providing the level of knowledge obtainable by using the current scientific methods.

For examples, though mathematics tries to understand nature by building a virtual world of its own, its a good approximation of the real thing. Thus, to the mathematician things are either discreet or continuous. While discreet phenomena (even very complex ones) are increasingly seen to follow relatively simple rules built upon each other, continuity (and infinity) is best understood using methods of estimation. There is a chasm between continuous and discreet matter that, in my opinion, any set of simple discreet rules can never explain continuity. Inherent in the very nature of continuity is such depth as to defy such simple rules.

Ofcourse, I could be wrong. And that's why I read Wolfram's book. Unfortunately, it came short of disproving my claims above and so I keep waiting.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Ideas
Review: Anyone who comes up with a new way of looking at the universe will face criticism. I bought this book despite some less-than-glowing reviews, and nevertheless was impressed. Reading this book is like seeing the sun shine from a new and strange angle. In that respect alone it was more than worth the price to me. It will keep me thinking for a long time.

Rating:
Summary: Please review the idea and not the man!
Review: Many of the reviewers object to the "arrogance", "revisonist history" and so forth that Wolfram displays. First, he talks about this in the Notes and if you haven't read the notes, you haven't read the book. As a neophyte to these ideas and some one with only undergraduate level math training, I found the book interesting and the cell automata models fascinating. What I find difficult is placing this in a social-historical-scientific context and the arrogant diatribes by reviewers against Wolfram just demonstrates how many Wolfram size egos there are out there! So, ladies and gentlemen, please review the idea and not the man. He is not the first, or the last twerp who happens to have contributed to science.

Rating:
Summary: Not so new, Stephen.
Review: Sorry, Stephen, but you showed up just in time to miss the boat.

I didn't buy this book, because I'd read a review in a newspaper, and had my suspicions. Before spending the money, I wanted to find out whether it was a book I needed to have a copy of, so I checked it out of the local library. And found that my caution was justified: I don't need a copy of this uninspiring and tiresome book.

I could overlook the strutting and self-trumpeting of the author if it weren't for the fact that he pretends (and apparently fools some readers into believing) that he has discovered (or invented - he isn't too clear on that point, nor on many others) something new. It's as if nobody ever bothered to tell him that there is a rather large collection of intertwined disciplines which have been under study and investigation by thousands of people for several decades, and that emergent behavior, while cool and all, is no big whoop-te-do surprise anymore. Though it's certainly far from being "explained" or even well understood, the field did not spring, full-blown, from the forehead of Stephen Wolfram, and in fact, he has very little new to say on the subject.

When I was thirteen years old, I discovered (or invented) trigonometry, or at least the rudiments of it, entirely on my own. Fortunately, I had sense enough not to make too big a deal out of it, because I suspected that someone else had probably discovered the same rules and relationships ahead of me. A year or so later, I found out I was right, and that lots of people had worked out the mathematics of triangles far beyond what I had discovered. I hope that somebody gently informs Mr. Wolfram that what he thought was his very own personal "New Science" isn't really his, and isn't really all that new.