GENESIS :

A Man Who Would Shake Up Science (EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, May 11, 2002, NY Times)

[Stephen Wolfram] has, he argues, discovered underlying principles that affect the development of everything from the human brain to
the workings of the universe, requiring a revolutionary rethinking of physics, mathematics, biology and other sciences. He believes he has shown how the most complex processes in nature can arise out of elemental rules, how a wealth of diverse phenomena--the infinite variety of snowflakes and the patterns on sea shells--are generated from seemingly trivial origins.

Conducting experiments on a computer, where he says he has logged 100 million keystrokes in the last 10 years, Mr. Wolfram wrote simple programs that generated odd and intricate patterns to test his ideas about complexity. He then tried to imitate designs found in nature. He argues that natural phenomena can be explored as if they were, in fact, computer programs, their evolution and behavior the products of intricate calculations. [...]

Mr. Wolfram, who was born in Britain, published his first paper on particle physics in 1975 at age 15, and obtained a doctorate at Caltech at 20 (where
Richard Feynman called him "astonishing"). He won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship at 21, reshaped the ways in which complex phenomena (like the movements of fluids) were analyzed before he was 26, founded an institute for the study of complexity at the University of Illinois, and then left academic life and research science, starting a software company, Wolfram Research Inc., in 1987. His main commercial product, a program called Mathematica, has become an international standard, used as a mathematical tool by over a million scientists and students and engineers in areas ranging from medical research to the analysis of weather. [...]

His theory developed out of a series of elementary computer experiments he conducted in the early 1980's. He was examining the way simple computer programs can generate shaded patterns on grids composed of square cells. A computer would be given a row of cells, some black, some white, along with a
set of simple rules that determine how succeeding lines of shaded cells are to be generated. Such programs have been called "cellular automata."

As one might expect, simple rules generally yield simple patterns. But Mr. Wolfram found one rule for generating a cellular automaton that yields no clear pattern at all. Its appearance is bizarre, unpredictable, seemingly chaotic. No one, Mr. Wolfram writes, could have expected this. Complexity was thought to arise only out of very complex rules; here it is generated out of simplicity. [...]

Here is where matters get quite difficult very fast. Not only can complex designs and processes arise out of the simplest of rules, but, Mr. Wolfram
asserts, simple rules actually lie behind the most sophisticated processes in the universe.

Hmmmmmm...so the entire universe could be created by someone operating from a fairly basic set of rules, eh? "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light..." Posted by Orrin Judd at May 13, 2002 8:17 AM