From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sat May 11 2002 - 11:28:43 MDT
Spudboy1 writes:
> The lack of peer review says it all.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/11/arts/11WOLF.html
>
> <<A Man Who Would Shake Up Science
> By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
>
> Some images on the back jacket of Stephen Wolfram's 1,197-page tome, "A New
> Kind of Science," are familiar: a splash of liquid, jets of gas, sea
> anemone, ancient mosaics and mollusk shells. But others become
> understandable only after working through ideas in this much-awaited book:
> spindly sketches of leaves and snowflakes, a baroque lacework of light,
> schematic diagrams that waver under the gaze.....
I wrote about Wolfram and his upcoming book last year at
http://www.extropy.org/bbs/index.php?board=60;action=display;threadid=49668.
He is a colorful character, a genuine scientific prodigy who was one
of the founders of the non-linear "chaos theory" craze of the 1980s.
He turned to business and made a fortune with his Mathematica empire.
Now he claims that his new book is the equivalent of "hundreds - maybe
thousands" of scientific papers.
The absence of pre-publication peer review is not that unusual for books.
It will certainly be peer reviewed after publication, and I am looking
forward to seeing what people think of it.
>From what I understand, Wolfram's basic point is to generalize
mathematical modelling. What is it about mathematics that makes it
appealing as a tool for studying nature? Ultimately it is first, that
it works well in many cases, and second, that it produces simple and
tractable formulas which can be manipulated and used to make predictions.
Wolfram claims that we can get many of the same properties from simple
computer programs that don't lend themselves to mathematical form, like
cellular automata programs. He shows how a number of natural phenomena
can be modelled very well by CAs.
The problem with this program, from what little I understand of it,
is that mathematics does more than provide a good model. It also has
the advantage that the mathematical model can then be manipulated,
combined with others, and so on. If gravitational acceleration is
g, then velocity after time t is g*t, and position is 1/2 * g * t^2.
Then we can incorporate friction, or gravitational changes with height,
and get more complicated and accurate expressions.
Whereas if we had just found or evolved a CA which mimicked the force
of gravity, that would be all. We wouldn't be able to apply tools and
go from force to velocity to position, as we can with mathematics.
Anyway, this is my concern from reading the blurbs about Wolfram's book
and looking at some of the sample pages on the web. He seems entranced
by the remarkable similarities between what his CAs produce and some
natural structures. But it's hard to see how you can do much more with
these relationships than to admire them.
Hal
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