From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Sun Jun 16 2002 - 11:19:39 MDT
While some people seem amazed at Wolfram's new book promoting a new kind
of science, some scientists don't see anything new in the book. They
say that it is a collection of current ideas already being investigated
by mainstream science. They claim that by remaining a recluse and
working on his manifesto in solitude, Wolfram has been out of the loop
of mainstream science. They say he has reinvented the wheel and is
proposing theories that mainstream science has already proposed.
(Has anybody looked at Wolfram's book yet?)
From
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/16/weekinreview/16JOHN.html?todaysheadlines>
:
"What's So New in a Newfangled Science?"
by
GEORGE JOHNSON
SCIENCE is a cumulative, fairly collegial venture. But every so often a
maverick, working in self-imposed solitude, bursts forth with a book
that aims to set straight the world with a new idea. Some of these grand
schemes spring from biology, some from physics, some from mathematics.
But what they share is the same unnerving message: everything you know
is wrong.
A self-employed British theorist named Julian Barbour recently argued
that time doesn't exist, and Frank Tipler, a physicist with a
theological bent, offered scientific proof, in "The Physics of
Immortality," of an eternal hereafter. People still read Julian Jaynes's
imposing 1976 book, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind," which pinpoints when humanity first became self-aware,
and (also from that era) the work of James Lovelock, inventor of the
Gaia Hypothesis, holding that the earth — rocks, air and all — is a
living, breathing superorganism.
But for sheer audacity — and intellectual salesmanship — it would be
hard to beat Stephen Wolfram, whose 1,263-page, self-published
manifesto, "A New Kind of Science," was holding its own last week atop
Amazon's best-seller chart, along with "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya
Sisterhood" and "The Nanny Diaries."
In the long tradition of the scientific loner, Dr. Wolfram, a freelance
physicist known among his colleagues for his abrasive and
self-aggrandizing ways, has yanked the spotlight onto a strikingly
counterintuitive idea — that the universe is really just a big computer,
something that can best be described not by analyzing equations but by
trying to figure out what kind of software it runs.
That, however, is just half the story. By short-circuiting the
traditional formalities of scientific publication, he has managed to
offend not just scientists who think he is wrong but also some who think
he is right. What hasn't always come across in the debate, which is
shaping up as the intellectual skirmish of the season, is that Dr.
Wolfram is not a lone voice in the woods.
Interesting ideas rarely spring up in isolation. The vision Dr. Wolfram
has so meticulously laid out in such an arresting manner is part of a
movement some call digital physics or digital philosophy — a worldview
that has been slowly developing for 20 years.
Just last week, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
named Seth Lloyd published a paper in Physical Review Letters estimating
how many calculations the universe could have performed since the Big
Bang — 10120 operations on 1090 bits of data, putting the mightiest
supercomputer to shame. This grand computation essentially consists of
subatomic particles ricocheting off one another and "calculating" where
to go.
As the researcher Tommaso Toffoli mused back in 1984, "In a sense,
nature has been continually computing the `next state' of the universe
for billions of years; all we have to do — and, actually, all we can do
— is `hitch a ride' on this huge ongoing computation."
This may seem like an odd way to think about cosmology. But some
scientists find it no weirder than imagining that particles dutifully
obey ethereal equations expressing the laws of physics. Last year Dr.
Lloyd created a stir on Edge.org, a Web site devoted to discussions of
cutting edge science, when he proposed "Lloyd's hypothesis": "Everything
that's worth understanding about a complex system can be understood in
terms of how it processes information."
Naturally a lot of researchers, who consider computers no more than
useful tools, react huffily to the suggestion that what they are doing
is "old science." So far no one using the alternative approach has been
able to match the equations of calculus in predicting, for example, the
exact moment of last week's solar eclipse for any spot on the planet.
What the detractors are less likely to emphasize is the track record of
traditional mathematical methods in forecasting, say, the recent
gyrations in the stock market or the way a forest fire will burn. Here
the usual methods of science are stretched to the limit — and that is
where an influential minority of scientists quietly agree on the kind of
cure Dr. Wolfram is so loudly prescribing: replacing equations with a
different kind of mathematical device called algorithms, simple little
computer programs.
THIS would represent a true upheaval. Mainstream science is rooted in
the notion that space and time form a continuum: a perfectly smooth
expanse that can be precisely described by what mathematicians call the
real numbers, those that can have an endless string of digits after the
decimal point. This kind of mathematics — the basis of calculus — is
undeniably powerful. Physicists can predict the characteristics of a
single subatomic particle with an accuracy equivalent to, as Richard
Feynman liked to say, estimating the distance between New York and Los
Angeles within the width of a human hair.
Why even think about replacing something that works so well? The problem
is that when you put a few electrons together and throw in a sprinkle of
neutrons and protons, the system that emerges rapidly becomes so complex
that exact predictions are impossible. The infinitesimally precise
numbers have a way of causing the equations to crash.
And that is where the contrarians rush in, proposing that reality is not
continuous but discrete, with a smallest possible length and a smallest
possible duration of time. Picture space-time as a kind of grid on which
the universe unfolds tick by tick, like a pattern in a kaleidoscope or a
program running on a computer.
In expressing their awe at the mathematical nature of creation,
physicists have playfully suggested that God is a mathematician. Why not
make him a software engineer? The result, says Edward Fredkin, another
early promoter of digital physics, "might be the beginnings of a new
intellectual revolution comparable to what was spawned by the
development of mathematics." (His own treatise is available on the Web
at digitalphilosophy.org.)
Had Dr. Wolfram been more demonstrative in parceling out credit to those
who share his vision (many are mentioned, in passing, in the book's
copious notes), they might be lining up to provide testimonials. It's
the kind of book some may wish they had written.
Instead they were busy writing papers, shepherding them through the
review process, presenting them in conferences, discussing them at
seminars and workshops — going through the paces of normal science. That
is how an idea progresses. But sometimes it takes a bombshell to bring
it to center stage.
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> Principal Security Consultant <www.Newstaff.com>
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