Posted on 05/28/2002 3:59:26 PM PDT by John H K
Care to get involved in the first great scientific debate of the new millennium? The good news is that you don't even have to know much about science to play.
You can start with the new book A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. In case you didn't notice, it shot to No. 1 book on Amazon.com earlier this month. No bookstore best seller, that performance was the result of huge pent up demand, with many anxious readers having waited as much as five years for its publication. Already, there's been a burst of stories about it in the New York Times and other publications. And you'll see a lot more in the weeks ahead. As it happens, I got the scoop on this story two years ago, with a long cover story in Forbes ASAP, one of those lucky breaks that comes from a unique confluence of events that a reporter gets two or three times in a career.
Wolfram, you see, isn't just an acknowledged genius in mathematics and physics, but also a successful entrepreneur. After having helped invent chaos theory, he grew frustrated with the academic life and set out to become a businessman. He developed a software program, the first to allow complex mathematics on the PC, and set out to market it under the name Mathematica.
Back then, as a hungry, out-of-work newspaperman, I helped Wolfram introduce Mathematica, which went on to become one of the most successful personal computer application programs of all time.
Mathematica also made Wolfram a rich man. But he soon grew bored with the process and, unbeknownst to the outside world, for nearly a decade he worked all night, every night, in the attic office of his executive home, puzzling out a new mathematical theory with awesome implications.
Wolfram seemed like one more great mind lost from research into the more lucrative world of commerce. Except for a few scientist friends, no one knew about his secret, other life … except for one man — the editor whom Wolfram approached to publish his magnum opus once it was completed.
That man happened to be an old neighbor of mine; it was he who'd brought me into Mathematica project. Every couple of years he'd whisper to me that Wolfram was "onto something big."
So, when I took over as editor of Forbes ASAP magazine, I set it as one my goals to get to Wolfram and tell his story. It took two years of wheedling, negotiating, begging, threatening and every other trick I knew. And then, unexpectedly, Wolfram agreed.
I arrived a Wolfram's well-lit house at 11 p.m. He was friendlier and more mysterious than the difficult young man I'd known a decade before. The grungy clothes of the arrogant academic had been replaced by the wool slacks and dress shirt of a middle-aged CEO. We embarked on an intense interview that lasted until four o'clock in the morning.
As I stumbled through the dark back to the car, I realized I had either just seen the greatest scientific discovery since Relativity … or the delusions of megalomaniac.
Now the rest of the world can reach its own conclusions. No doubt thousands of scientists and mathematicians all over the world are poring over A New Kind of Science right now, shaking their heads in awe at Wolfram's presumption, trying to poke holes in his theory.
What makes Wolfram's project so jaw-dropping is that he doesn't just claim to have come up with a revolutionary new theory, he doesn't just claim to have discovered a new science; he doesn't even just claim (as the book's title claims) to have come up a new kind of science.
No, Wolfram claims to have done all of these things in support of a discovery that will explain the whole universe. That's guts, folks.
Is Wolfram right? Beats me. But his new theory is stunningly simple. It begins with something called cellular automata. Think tiles. Let's say you've got tons of little black and white square tiles and you want to set them down into a pattern.
So you make a rule, something cool and complicated so you won't be bored, say: Put down a white tile if the one you put down just before it was black, and its two neighbors are all black or all white or if the last one was white and the two neighbors are black and white respectively; otherwise make it black.
So you put down a few million of these tiles and for a while you get a predictable, regular pattern. Then, out of the blue, weird little anomalies appear, then more and more. Pretty soon all sorts of crazy patterns start to emerge and none of them ever repeats itself. This is what happened to Wolfram when he began fooling around with cellular automata on a computer.
Cellular automata have been around for centuries, mostly in the form of tile mosaics, and have become of great interest to mathematicians in the last 50 years.
But nobody had ever systematically taken the 256 different possible rules for two color (i.e. black and white) cells operating under the simplest of operations, and then run those combinations out to millions of steps.
In most cases, what Wolfram saw was simple repeating patterns, like a chessboard. But in a handful of rules, notably the rule described above, called Rule 110, the pattern grew ever more chaotic and complex. Several million steps out, Wolfram began to see forms that resembled the patterns in snowflakes and seashells.
It struck him that what he might be seeing was a way to construct the entire universe, including biological organisms, using only handful of pieces and some simple rules, reiterated trillions and trillions of times.
He spent the next eight years spinning out the implications of this idea in physics, fluid dynamics, evolutionary biology and mathematics itself. For a more complete explanation of what Wolfram did, visit his Web site (www.wolfram.com).
Can It Explain Life?
One person who's already taken up Wolfram's challenge is Ray Kurzweil, himself a brilliant scientist and inventor. Kurzweil became something of a celebrity back in 1999 with the publication of his Age of Spiritual Machines, which argued that it would soon be possible to map our brains into computers, thus gaining immortality.
Kurzweil has already published his first challenge to Wolfram In his review, Kurzweil is willing to admit that Wolfram is onto something. Perhaps he may even have found the fundamental rules of physics (no little thing in itself, one might add).
But Kurzweil also finds Wolfram's model, even Rule 110, insufficiently complex to have produced living organisms. That, he argues, requires much more than just automata, but also some form of evolution, not just of the organisms themselves, but also the rules that govern them.
Is Kurzweil right? Once again, beats me. But it is certainly a challenge from a direction — Wolfram's model isn't interesting enough — that I never expected.
What I do know is that this is a unique opportunity to be at the birth (or evisceration) of a brand new science, to understand what it's about, to join in the debate, and perhaps, if you are lucky, make your own contribution.
Wolfram says that the various permutations of rules and cells is so lengthy that it may take decades to puzzle them all out — and just about everybody can do their part. There hasn't been an opportunity like this for us amateurs since Darwin, Faraday and Mendel in the 19th century. Now's your chance.
One of the most interesting parts of Wolfram's new science is that it challenges key parts of the theory of natural selection. Wolfram doesn't dispute Darwinism, but argues that it is of comparatively minor importance compared to what is, in fact, the mere working out of a finite number of possible forms.
By an eerie coincidence, the research he directly challenges to make his case is that of the late Stephen Jay Gould's work with land snails of the West Indies. Now, with his untimely death, Gould won't get a chance to respond.
I spent a long afternoon with Gould nearly a decade ago, while interviewing him for a public television series, and he later wrote a memorable pair of essays for Forbes ASAP. I found him to be a charming, tough, and highly entertaining man. At least in person (if not in print) he treated fools lightly.
Most of all, Gould loved baseball, especially his beloved Boston Red Sox, and he would chuckle like an excited kid when he spoke of them. Now he'll never get to see them win a World Series.
Oh, I have no idea what Wolfram has in mind. I was just stating why fractals and cellular automata are so mathematically different.
I've been wondering that. Didn't John Horton Conway make a similar series of claims for automata?
Indeed. Or perhaps speculation rather than claims. So did Solomon W. Golomb and others. That was thirty or more years ago.
I can't help thinking that scientific results would be much more readily accepted by the public, if only they realized that their comfort level is irrelevant to the facts of nature. "Whatever nature has in store for us, we must learn to accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge." -- Enrico Fermi
Or that it can't be so solved. But if someone wants to make a rigorous case either way, I'm willing to listen.
Has anyone ever read "How The Leopard Changed Its Spots" by Brian Goodwin?
The topic of morphological change is expanded quite well in that work. It is also a good counter to Dawkins.
Douglas Hofstadter also touches on the subject in one of his Metamagical Themas in Scientific American. The March, '82 issue titled "The Genetic Code: Arbitrary?"
As a side note if you liked Hofstadter's "GEB" you will like his collection of "Metamagical Themas".
As with all discrete systems, celluar automata can be made to approximate continuous structures.
Celluar automata is a kind of discrete dynamical system which is governed by a set of logical rules rather than continous functions, as in the case of a set of ordinary differential equations. Due to its discrete nature, it was a popular topic in Computer Science. Also in some physics circle.
I have to say that making things discrete frequently robs a system of its essential nature, while simplifying the system. Sometimes wrong simplication can lead to the wrong track. The essence can be left out during the simplification process, the process of discretization.
Believe or not, a set of simple rules can generate many strange complicated structures, which cannot be adequately categorized and analyzed. The number of rules does not determine eventual complexity of generated structures. It is the interplay of rules over many many derivations which produce many fascinating and bewildering structures.
Anybody who has studied computation complexity can understands this. This is, in a way, the crux of chaos theory, too. Deceptively simple equations generating seemingly impossible-to-analyze behaviors.
We are just dawning on this possibility in a last couple of decades. As for his books, my take on it after reading this article is that he wrapped known topic (cellular automata) with grand implications. He used to publish article on cellular automata in Scienctific American more than a decade ago. He tried to push celluar automata as a theoretical tool for analyzing complex physical behaviors. I guess he set a sight much higher now. I have to see if he made any completely new discovery other than digesting other materials(biology, philosophy, etc) and presenting this in a new broader framework.
Hmmm, sounds like typical euro-trash defeatism. Not too long ago 'nature had in store for us' that we would eat roots and twigs, scavenge rotting animal carcasses and sleep in the rain as the means of our existence.
When we accept materialism and determinism to decide our fate the tyrants will be close at hand.
And what if that's really how the universe works? Do we keep the wool over the public's eyes because we fear the political consequences of the truth? And how do we deal with scientists who dare to challenge the orthodoxy? These aren't idle questions; they follow ineluctably from exactly the belief you espouse. Galileo was only the most famous example.
It's like I always say: The universe is the way it is, and not how we would wish it to be.
Not quite … Scientists are only trying to understand how God did it.
I have no problem with science per se. My objection is with some who call themselves scientists and profess to use science to explain what the creator was up to. Intellectual arrogance and hubris is what I object to. God certainly gave us intellignece and science is a tool. It is not a key to open the mind of God. There is no key for that. We may be able to understand what God wants us to understand if we have the will and desire, but who are we to suppose that man can see into the ways and means of our creator?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.