Michael J. Hehir's Radio Weblog

I'm compiling a list of links about Stephen Wolfram's new book.

Stephen Wolfram
What started my work on A New Kind of Science are the discoveries I made about what simple computer programs can do. One might have thought that if a program was simple it should only do simple things. But amazingly enough, that isn't even close to correct. And in fact what I've discovered is that some of the very simplest imaginable computer programs can do things as complex as anything in our whole universe.

Steven Levy
Word had been out that Stephen Wolfram, the onetime enfant terrible of the science world, was working on a book that would Say It All, a paradigm-busting tome that would not only be the definitive account on complexity theory but also the opening gambit in a new way to view the universe. But no one had read it.

David Appell
Recluse, maverick physicist and Mathematica developer Stephen Wolfram claims to have revolutionized science with his new, computer-based theories.

Wolfram publishes A New Kind of Science
The culmination of twenty years of private and furtive work by the creator of Mathematica, A New Kind of Science purports to revolutionize science and mathematics through the application of cellular automata. Normally, claimants with such hubris are laughed off by serious scientists, but Wolfram is arguably one of the brightest minds in science. With this book, Wolfram begins his attempt to take his science to the mainstream and put his name besides those of Einstein and Newton.

Interviews and Publications about Stephen Wolfram

Jim Holt
Ever since Newton, scientists have dreamed of capturing the universe in a neat set of equations. And who can blame them? From the law of gravity to e=mc2, equations have been stunningly successful in rendering the world around us comprehensible. But not all of the world. A lot of really complex phenomena—the turbulence of a flowing liquid, the pattern on a mollusk shell, the gyrations of the stock market, the wiring of the human brain—seem to resist being reduced to the simplicity of an equation. Does that mean they will forever elude our understanding? Not according to Stephen Wolfram.

Marcus Chown
He was a child prodigy, publishing his first paper at 15. Now Stephen Wolfram says he has created a new kind of science based on simple computer programs rather than equations. It's a bold claim, but it has taken him 20 years—ten of them thinking and working late into the night, and publishing nothing. By a nice irony, that intellectual space was bought by the millions he made out of Mathematica, a computer program that makes complicated mathematics doable for ordinary mortals. Now, at 41, he's busy gearing himself up for the glare of publicity as he prepares to publish the fruit of all those years.

Michael S. Malone
On a blistering night in late May, I find myself lost on the gritty streets of South Side Chicago. A young man named Ben is driving me to the man who claims to understand how billions of tiles could make the image of a rose on the floor of a football stadium. In fact, how simple rules such as those represented by the tiles might create the whole universe—and along the way, change how we think about everything from physics to philosophy, from stock markets to weather prediction.