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Wolfram is completely full of himself, and this book is tedious, nay. I felt like it was making me dumber by the page. turgid. I could not take it anymore and gave up on this 1100 page tome somewhere in chapter 6. In fact, I propose a new SI unit of hubris, the Wolfram. This book is probably 0.75 wolframs (unlike his Wolfram Alpha "search engine" which is a good 0.9-1.0 wolframs), only because it's clear that he was modeling this effort on Benoit Mandelbrot's seminal work 'The Fractal Geometry of Nature', except for the investigation of cellular automata and genetic algorithms instead of complex numbers.
The New Kind of Science that he develops proposes to, instead of observing our physical universe and attempting to model it, explore the universe of all possible simple computations and search for the rules that reproduce our physical universe. Since Descartes, scientific rationalism, and the enormous progress it has achieved, has been based upon the scientific method; observe some phenomenon, imagine a model of equations for the laws of this phenomenon, test whether the model produces accurate predictions with a controlled experiment.Unfortunately, as Wolfram points out, this system has been unable to establish any meaningful laws about the complex phenomena of the universe. But, as he argues, developments in computer science and complexity have made it possible to use a new scientific method to study these problems. This is made much easier by modern digital computers, but it does not mean that monks in the middle ages could not have done science the same way.This is heresy to the scientific establishment, many of whom cannot even understand Wolfram's point and believe he is taking credit for the evidence in favor of his argument. For Wolfram and his disciples, this establishment is irrelevant, and they will soon lead humanity into an era of unparalleled discovery.
Wolfram is an authentic genius; enormous egos are common in that circle.Based largely upon his personal vision, a novel era of experimental math research will soon open.That era will reveal vast, hitherto unsuspected fields of knowledge and entertainment. Its cultural impact will be comparable to the advent of television and personal computers.Those who now believe they have put Wolfram firmly in his place or dismissed the actual thrust of this volume will, in a few short years, seriously reconsider their positions.
So far a very good book. Wofram seems to bring science to a new dimension. I am looking forward to our journey together.
I think the author makes many good points about the potential of the possible benefits to science to be had by stepping outside conventional methods. There's so much going on in this book that I couldn't possibly grasp it all, especially considering my limited mathematics knowledge. More examples and metaphors would have been helpful also, but unfortunately, in the authors opinion they do more harm than good as he notes early in the notes section.
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