From: Jef Allbright (jef_allbright@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat May 11 2002 - 16:45:10 MDT
This is going to be fun. I've been intuitively primed for this since the early eighties, from about the time I read Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics and realized that nature certainly doesn't calculate pi out to some degree of precision every time a soap bubble is formed. It's like going from the strained complexity of Ptolemy and Copernicus to the much simpler and comprehensive theories of Kepler. As the old paradigm builds up excrescences, and the conceptual framework begins to get too complex, it's due to be replaced by something more elegant.
Hang on folks, it new paradigm time...
- Jef
----- Original Message -----
From: Spudboy100@aol.com
To: extropians@extropy.org
Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2002 6:23 AM
Subject: wolfram finally publishes
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.....
.....Many of these images, created by Mr. Wolfram, are ghostlike reductions of
familiar objects, skeletal representations of processes that may lie beneath
natural forms. And they were produced during a decade of work that was kept
hidden from professional scrutiny......
These might seem the claims of a semimystical scientific crank. After all,
the book is being published (on Tuesday) not by a university press but by
Mr. Wolfram's own company (Wolfram Media Inc.), and he has insisted on
secrecy in a scientific world used to peer review and public conferences.
But secrecy and grandiosity have also accompanied major scientific works .....>>
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