The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything ..
.
... But first it cracked him. The inside story of how Stephen
Wolfram went from boy genius to recluse to science renegade.
By 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.
Though physically unimposing with a soft, round face and a droll
English accent polished at Eton and Oxford, Wolfram had already
established himself as a larger-than-life figure in the gossipy
world of science. A series of much-discussed reinventions made
him sort of the Bob Dylan of physics. He'd been a child genius,
and at 21 had been the youngest member of the storied first class
of MacArthur genius awards. After laying the groundwork for a
brilliant career in particle physics, he'd suddenly switched to
the untraditional pursuit of studying complex systems, and, to
the establishment's dismay, dared to pioneer the use of computers
as a primary research tool. Then he seemed to turn his back on
that field. He started a software company to sell Mathematica, a
computer language he'd written that did for higher math what the
spreadsheet did for business. It made him a rich man. Now he had
supposedly returned to science to write a book that would make
the biggest splash of all. And, as someone who'd followed his
progress since the mid-1980s, I was going to see some of it.
We agreed to meet for dinner in Berkeley. As I drove to the
restaurant, rain started coming down in sheets; on the pavement,
water ran toward the gutter in twisted, chaotic rivulets -
seemingly unfathomable patterns that I would never view in the
same way after Stephen Wolfram was done with me. We chatted
through dinner, remembering some of our history. And then he
handed over a stack of papers. The type was set and the diagrams
were sharp - apparently he was almost at the page-proof stage,
with publication pending. I'd known about his work in a former
backwater of physics called cellular automata, and as I read the
first few paragraphs, it was clear he was using that research as
a background to make more profound statements. Very profound
statements. As best I could make out in my quick flip through the
pages, he seemed to be saying that the key to the universe was
computation: The entire cosmos, from quantum particles to the
formation of galaxies, was a perpetual runtime flowing from
simple rules. Yet despite all our learning, human beings have
missed the point of it all, because of the elusive nature of
complexity. That is, until Stephen Wolfram came along and
uncovered what a few millennia's worth of scientists had somehow
failed to comprehend. Whoa.
I wondered if the pages I was holding would actually be a part of
history. Or would they be regarded as folly, an act of hubris by
a brain-punk who'd been thumbing his nose at the scientific
establishment even before he began to shave? I handed it back to
him, with the assurance that upon its completion within a few
months, I'd get a chance to go through it at my own pace. And so
would the world.
That was 10 years ago.
What happened to Stephen Wolfram in the interim has become sort
of an urban legend in the scientific community. Not long after
our dinner, which occurred in the spring of 1992, he became, in
his own words, a "recluse." He moved, with the woman he had
recently married (a mathematician), to the Chicago area and
started a family. He rarely made the two-hour drive to Wolfram
Research, his thriving software company. Instead, he put himself
in a kind of voluntary house arrest, single-mindedly devoted to
the completion of the book. "He dropped totally out of the scene
in every sense of the word," says his friend Terrence Sejnowski,
a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute. "He hasn't published a
word, he doesn't go to meetings. He's in a self-made isolation
center." To maximize his concentration, Wolfram became nocturnal:
He worked at night, when the world was asleep, and retired at 8
in the morning.
As the Web emerged and exploded, as dotcoms boomed and busted, as
the White House went from Bush to Clinton to Bush, he worked. At
some point he had decided that no conventional publisher would
provide the attention and exacting standards that his book
demanded. (He had no lack of offers.) So he decided to do it
himself, using the resources of his software company. It would
result in one of the most expensive vanity projects in history.
Or as one friend, Gregory Chaitin, an information theorist at
IBM, puts it, "He reminds me of the noblemen who worked in
science during the 1800s - they did it for the love of it."
Wolfram's days would begin in mid-afternoon. He'd usually do an
hour or two of official business, operating a multimillion-dollar
company by email and conference call. Early evening hours offered
an opportunity for some family time. Then, as the world retired
and distractions fell away, he'd enter the professionally
soundproofed, wood-lined office on the top floor of his house and
immerse himself in the act of remaking science.
He spent hours running thousands of computer simulations and
noting the results. Because part of his project involved nailing
down the conceptual history of dozens of scientific branches,
he'd surf the Web. "One can devour lots of papers in very short
amounts of time in the middle of the night," he would later
explain to me. He'd begin with an idea, and start downloading
papers. Eventually, "you feel kind of depressed that it's too big
a field and you're never going to understand it." But then,
"usually in a few days it all starts to kind of crystallize and
you realize that there really are only three ideas in this field,
and two of them you don't believe. And sometimes at that stage,
when I'm checking that I've really got all of the ideas, I find
it useful to chat with people. Sometimes you hear about something
else. And sometimes you don't."
Wolfram's friends came to know the drill. "You get a call at 2 in
the morning," says Sejnowski. "By the morning he knows more than
you do." Every two weeks or so, Wolfram would call an outside
expert, but usually found these sessions unsatisfying. All too
often he'd be disappointed that the alleged master couldn't
provide him with the information he needed.
He pressed on, never a day off. "I wanted a straight line from
where I started to where I wanted to get to," he says. "I cut off
interaction with the outside world - not that it wouldn't have
been fun, I personally like it - but those little perturbations
would make the thing take longer." On a good night, he'd get a
page written, and he'd be a few hundred words closer to
finishing. And so it went, night after night, a lone explorer
inventing his own brand of science while the world slept.
At various times, it appeared publication was imminent. Those who
purchased a collection of his scientific papers, issued in
hardback in 1994, saw an image of the cover art for his book,
then titled A Science of Complexity ("coming soon," the caption
said, "sure to become a landmark in the history of modern
science"). Over the next few years, Wolfram teased his public by
hinting at the contents in occasional interviews. But the
publication date kept moving back. Wolfram's friends seriously
feared that it would never be completed.
Wolfram predicts an algorithmic key to the universe that can
compute quantum physics - or, say, reality TV - in four lines of
code.
Early last year, Wolfram told me he was almost finished, this
time for real. He promised to send me an early copy, if I would
sign a nondisclosure agreement. A few days later, A New Kind of
Science arrived. My copy (number 26) was broken up into three
thick sections. Together they dwarfed a phone book. A sticker on
the otherwise blank cover was printed with my name on it. There
was a disconcerting warning: "CONFIDENTIAL: Receipt and perusal
of this document permitted pursuant to nondisclosure agreement
... If you do not have such an agreement please return this
immediately...."
If I thought that the draft I had glimpsed in 1992 was
provocative, it was nothing compared with the scope and sheer
chutzpah of the finished product. Scheduled to reach stores in
May, A New Kind of Science will ignite controversy in the
scientific world. The self-conscious comparisons with Newton's
1687 Principia will undoubtedly earn Wolfram both attention and
derision. Some early readers are drawing analogies instead to
Galileo - not in terms of scientific achievement, but heresy.
At 1,280 pages, the book pushes the limit of what can be
physically bound between two covers. Inside, it recognizes no
boundaries, not only ranging through traditional fields of
science but venturing into the realms of philosophy, theology,
the social sciences, and even extraterrestrial policy. There are
two sections, the larger being a main text of 12 chapters written
in everyday English, with almost no equations, in order to reach
an audience of nonspecialists. (One of his friends, Carnegie
Mellon mathematical logician Dana Scott, complained to Wolfram
that A New Kind of Science reads like USA Today. As if.) Just as
important as the text are hundreds of detailed diagrams, the
majority of them visual representations of experiments run from
Mathematica programs.
The second section is a collection of notes, which includes a
piecemeal yet concise history of science through the filter of a
didactic middle-aged, MacArthur-winning Jedi mind-warrior. It
also contains personal notes, bits of Mathematica code, various
mentions of previous work (though bibliographic comments are
scrupulously avoided), and an index of 15,000 entries.
To Wolfram, adopting a relatively readable style also meant
jettisoning all pretense of humility, a trait that in any case he
believes is a waste of time. In a note titled "Clarity and
modesty," he admits to having once subscribed to the "common
style of understated scientific writing" but concluded that
unless he explicitly identified his findings as the
earth-shattering concepts he believed them to be, readers
wouldn't grasp their significance. Of course, the very nature of
his approach - laying his theory out in one Brobdingnagian salvo
- is by nature immodest.
By rejecting the standard protocols of scientific publication -
the release of findings in a series of refereed, jargon-laden
papers with rigorous mathematical proofs - Wolfram is consciously
bypassing the establishment, engaging in a form of retail science
that aims straight for the people. Wolfram insists that "doing a
small piece and telling the world about it" would have taken him
three times longer, and besides, "if you give them little pieces,
they're not going to come up with grand conclusions."
The book begins with a thunderclap:
"Three centuries ago
science was transformed by the dramatic new idea that rules based
on mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural
world. My purpose in this book is to initiate another such
transformation, and to introduce a new kind of science that is
based on the much more general types of rules that can be
embodied in simple computer programs."
He goes on to explain that by applying a single key
observation -
that the most complicated
behavior imaginable arises from very simple rules - one can view
and understand the universe with previously unattainable clarity
and insight.
The idea of complexity
arising from simple rules - and that the universe can best be
understood by way of the computation it requires to grind out
results from those rules - is at the center of the book.
The big idea is that the algorithm is mightier than the
equation.
"Stephen makes the point that Newton developed calculus before
Babbage invented computing - but what if it had been the other
way?" says Rocky Kolb, a physicist at the Swiss physics
laboratory CERN.
Wolfram is not satisfied with simply explaining and justifying
his contentions, but instead makes substantial efforts to
apply his insights to dozens of fields.
"What's basically
happened is that I had this idea of how to use simple programs to
understand things about nature, the universe, other stuff," he
says. "And you can start looking at questions that have been
around forever, and you really get somewhere." He invariably
introduces each topic in a similar fashion: Curious to know about
_______ [CHOOSE ANY SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE] and how his new
theories might apply, he decides to take a look at the history of
the field. Amazingly, he concludes, for hundreds of years
so-called experts have failed to answer key questions that should
have been easily resolved centuries ago. (Wolfram's
disappointment in his predecessors is bottomless.) But when
Wolfram applies the ideas from A New Kind of Science, he begins
making progress and expresses the hunch that not long after his
ideas are understood, the biggest problems will quickly be
resolved, transforming the field.
To list only a few examples: Wolfram finds
- an exception to the second law of thermodynamics;
- conjectures why extraterrestrials might be communicating
with us in messages we can't perceive;
- explains seeming randomness in financial markets;
- defines randomness;
- elaborates on why the "apparent freedom of human will" is so
convincing;
- reconstructs the foundations of mathematics;
- devises a new way to perform encryption;
- insists that Darwinian natural selection is an overrated
component in evolution;
- and, oh, theorizes that there's a "definite ultimate model
for the universe." What might this be? The mother of all rules; a
single, simple "ultimate rule" that computes everything from
quantum physics to reality television.
The climax of the book is the principle of computational
equivalence, which may as well be called "Wolfram's
law."
After hundreds of pages of laying groundwork, presenting case
after case of visual
examples where simple rules generate counterintuitively
complex results, Wolfram concludes that this phenomenon is
overwhelmingly commonplace - it's at the base of everything from
morphology to traffic jams.
Then he goes further, stating that once a system achieves a
certain, easily attainable degree of complexity, it's reached the
point of maximum complexity, as measured by the computation
required to crank out the end result. Everything at that level of
complexity - and that means almost everything you can think of,
from human thought to rain hitting pavement - is exactly as
complex as anything else.
It's an idea that is at once liberating and humbling.
Wolfram himself considers
it the logical next step from earlier scientific revolutions,
each of which disabused humanity of the notion that there is
something "special" about our species and its place in the scheme
of things.
(Copernicus showed we
weren't the center of the universe;
Darwin proved we were just another product of evolution.)
Basically, he's saying that all we hold dear - our minds, if
not our souls - is a computational consequence of a simple
rule.
"It's a very negative conclusion about the human condition," he
admits. "You know, consider those gas clouds in the universe that
are doing a lot of complicated stuff. What's the difference
[computationally] between what they're doing and what we're
doing? It's not easy to see."
The principle of
computational equivalence also puts limits on science itself,
ruling many questions unanswerable because the only way to
discover the consequences of many complex processes is to let
things proceed naturally. There's no shortcut, since our
own computational tools are at best only as powerful as the
complicated systems we hope to study.
On the other hand, if the concept is valid, it portends
amazing technological developments.
"You might think machines
can't capture nature because these programs are too simple,"
Wolfram says. "But the principle of computational equivalence
says that's just not true. These programs can do all the stuff
that happens in nature." By that reasoning, no barriers exist
to prevent machines from thinking as humans do. "I have
little doubt," he writes, "that within a matter of a few decades
what I have done will have led to some dramatic changes in the
foundations of technology - and in our basic ability to take what
the universe provides and apply it for our own human purposes."
Only a few people - mainly friends of his in the scientific
community - have read the book before its publication. They are
vastly impressed, but at this point generally reluctant to
endorse all of it; they say people will take decades to absorb
everything Wolfram is proposing. Not heard from yet are the
voices of the establishment, which undoubtedly will have problems
with the unconventional work and its author. "Most scientists
will find it difficult to believe that there's a better way to do
science," says CERN's Kolb. "It's not the way we've been trained
to think."
Probably the toughest criticism will come from those who reject
Wolfram's ideas because the evidence for his contentions is based
on observing systems contained inside computers. "When it comes
to computer experiments," he says, "I can just do them and can
know absolutely - definitively - I got the right answer and
understand what's going on." Wolfram can argue at length why this
is a valid approach. Ultimately, he believes, he and his future
followers will generate a wealth of computer-related systems that
create phenomena identical to those found in the natural world -
and the weight of the evidence will convince all but the most
hardened skeptics that his ideas are dead-on. The beginnings of
this are rules that seem to produce on a computer the same
results as pigmentation patterns on jaguars and seashells, the
behavior of financial markets, or the growth of leaves.
For now, the skeptics aren't having it. "Worthless!" says
renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, who received an early copy
of A New Kind of Science and required only a glance before
dismissing it. "It's a case of style over substance."
If Wolfram's ideas ultimately are refuted, he will be remembered
as one more brilliant guy who went overboard, verging on
megalomania. But even if he is wrong, A New Kind of Science is an
incredible achievement, one that will richly reward adventuresome
readers. Of course, if he is right, his book indeed belongs to
history. Either way, the world is about to reckon with a
scientist who's making the biggest leap imaginable: remaking
science itself, with only his computer and his brain.
In a sense, A New Kind of Science is the result of a journey that
began with a computer printout produced by an early Sun
workstation on June 1, 1984. Stephen Wolfram, then 25, was
already on his second career. Born in 1959 to a father who was
both a textile manufacturer and a minor novelist, and a mother
who taught philosophy at Oxford, the young Wolfram was clearly a
prodigy - and a handful. "I guess I was not a very easy kid,"
Wolfram told me when we first met in 1984. His baby-sitters would
typically leave after a week or so "because I was terrible to
them."
At age 10, he decided to become a scientist and began operating
in much the same isolated manner that would characterize his
later methodology. Almost from the start, he developed an allergy
to the establishment. At 12, he won a scholarship to Eton, where
he astonished teachers with his brilliance and frustrated them by
taking no instruction whatsoever. He made money by doing other
kids' math homework. At 14, he became interested in a particle
physics problem and wound up writing a paper that was accepted by
a prestigious professional journal. He entered Oxford at age 17,
but it is an exaggeration to say he attended it - by his account,
he went to first-year lectures on his first day and found them
"awful." The next two days he dropped in on second- and then
third-year lectures, quickly deciding "it was all too horrible -
I wasn't going to go to any more lectures." So he worked
independently, making no secret of his disdain for the professors
he considered his intellectual inferiors. When he took
end-of-year exams, he finished at the top of his class.
Eventually, after publishing 10 papers, he left Oxford for
Caltech, which presented him with a PhD in theoretical physics
just weeks after he turned 20 and hired him as a faculty member
alongside luminaries like Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. A
year later, he won the MacArthur award. He considered the
surrounding hubbub an annoyance, and during a network TV
interview he conspicuously picked his nose.
At Caltech, he ran into his first serious professional flap.
Wolfram had become interested in how computers could help the
scientific process; he developed SMP, a computer language that
performed tasks like algebra. Because of Caltech's patent rules,
an ugly dispute broke out, and Wolfram was forever embittered
that he was denied sole ownership of what he considered his
creation. He left Caltech for a sinecure at the Institute for
Advanced Study, the Princeton, New Jersey-based former home of
Albert Einstein. But by that time, he was no longer interested in
particle physics. Instead, he began pursuing what he viewed as
more creative areas, "things that people would consider crazy."
Specifically, he became interested in cellular automata.
At the time, the field of cellular automata, or CAs, oscillated
between a science and a computer geek's plaything. CAs themselves
are abstract systems that pose a spreadsheetlike universe in
which individual cells move from one condition to another - for
example, from dark to light - one click at a time, according to
what rules have been set for this evolution. These rules
determine the color of the cells in the next iteration, depending
on the conditions of the current pattern. The word automata
refers to the nature of the process, in which the patterns on the
grid evolve depending not on human intervention but on the rules
themselves: Once the initial condition and those rules are set,
all a person can do is sit back and watch.
The field was the brainchild of the legendary mathematician John
von Neumann, at the suggestion of his friend Stanislaw Ulam. Von
Neumann was interested in the idea of artificial life,
particularly self-reproduction. His claim - which would be echoed
by those who went on to study CAs - was that these systems should
not be seen solely as mathematical abstractions but as
stripped-down versions of the universe itself, wherein the
pageant of cells turned on and off on a checkerboard (or computer
screen) could actually stand for the mechanisms in the physical
world. One computer scientist, Ed Fredkin, the former head of
MIT's famous Project MAC, bent some minds by suggesting that the
universe itself was a giant cellular automaton.
Not surprisingly, Wolfram regarded the early work in the field as
"just awful" and proceeded to brand the category as his own,
somewhat to the dismay of the small CA community, which
appreciated the attention Wolfram brought but resented his
imperious attitude. ("Wolfram is an absolutely brilliant guy, and
he's right about the new kind of science that underlies
everything," says Fredkin. "But he can't escape a compulsion to
take credit.") Wolfram methodically analyzed sets of rules,
developing a classification system that rated the complexity of
various CAs - all with the intention of clarifying the way we
view complexity in the real world. He did this by studying and
numbering all possible rule sets in one-dimensional CAs. These
were elementary systems in which the CA grows one line at a time;
the state - dark or light - of each cell on the new line is
determined by a rule that depends on the conditions on the
previous line.
Wolfram also began to build a case that the same mechanisms that
determined the outcome of cellular-automata experiments were
omnipresent in nature itself. He was often photographed with
seashells whose pigment displayed a pattern that was eerily
similar to those produced in his computer printouts of simple CA
experiments.
Wolfram was a controversial figure at the Princeton institute in
the mid-1980s. Established scientists considered his operation on
the third floor of Fuld Hall, where he and his assistants sat in
front of workstations and performed digital experiments, as
somehow unseemly, not the way serious research should be
conducted. "I'm not sure that what he does can be called
science," the institute's Dyson told me around that time. "It's
more in the nature of mathematical games. He clearly is not a
physicist anymore." And Heinz Pagels, the late physicist who
headed the New York Academy of Sciences, told me, "The wunderkind
has no clothes."
For his part, Wolfram felt he could have used more outrage - it
would have meant people were thinking about those ideas and
taking them seriously. In
Wolfram's mind, studying the results of cellular-automata runs on
the computer could unlock deep truths about the universe itself.
The proof for him came one fateful day in June 1984 when he
printed out the results of a 2-D cellular-automata experiment
using Rule 30.
When Wolfram studied the
printouts on an airline flight from New York to London, he was
thunderstruck. This experiment used the simplest of initial
conditions - one darkened cell on the top row. And the process of
generating future states was elementary. Yet Rule 30 yielded an
eruption of the most complicated, seemingly random output
imaginable. (See page 135.) In fact, there seemed no end to it.
As Wolfram studied it, he began to realize that there was
something profound about how such complexity would arise from a
simple program and began to wonder about the implications.
Eventually, he would conclude that Rule 30 was not an anomaly
but a crucial window onto the way the world operated.
Wolfram's cellular-automata work came to be cited in more than
10,000 papers. He felt, however, that even his enthusiasts were
missing the point - that CAs held the key to a vast understanding
of the world. Aware that the Institute for Advanced Study was not
eager to host his explorations, he left for the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which gave him his own institute,
the Center for Complex Systems Research. But after two years, he
left the center - among his many complaints, he says, "the
goofiest thing was that I was supposed to be the guy who went out
to raise money, while other people got to do science." By then,
he had seemingly been diverted by another project - creating a
computer language called Mathematica, which took his SMP work at
Caltech to a much higher level. He started Wolfram Research and
hired top scientists and mathematicians to staff its Champaign
headquarters. The software came out in 1988 and was an instant
success. By 1995, more than a million people were using it.
Mathematica turned out to be invaluable to Wolfram, allowing him
to pursue his real dream of making a mammoth contribution to
scientific understanding. On a mundane level, the company brought
him the wealth and resources to proceed with his book without
having to worry about income or research grants - since Wolfram
Research was a private company, with the majority of shares owned
by its founder, there was no problem spending millions of dollars
on a personal science project. More significantly, the creator of
the software turned out to be its most avid consumer. Mathematica
was a powerful tool to run the experiments that formed the basis
of his "new kind of science." A couple of years after the program
was finished, Wolfram gushed to me that "I've been going back and
redoing problems, and it's spectacular - things that once took me
a week to do now take a half hour." Wolfram had given himself the
ammunition to remake science, and in 1991, he withdrew his
physical presence from the company to concentrate on the book. So
began his days as a recluse.
On a crisp morning in February this year, I am off to Champaign
to sit down with Wolfram for the first time since that night in
Berkeley a decade ago. Only a few days before, he absolutely,
positively completed A New Kind of Science. Still trying to
acclimate himself to the weird circumstance of being awake at 9
in the morning, the CEO is making a rare appearance at Wolfram
Research, located in an six-story office building not far from
the university campus, to review some projects. (The book itself
- 50,000 copies - is about to roll off presses at a Canadian
printer, the only operation in the western hemisphere that
Wolfram judged capable of rendering the high-definition graphics
and illustrations. It will cost $12 a copy to print - five or six
times that of a conventional book - making its $45 cover price
somewhat of a bargain.) What was a mop of unruly hair when we
last met is now a balding pate. He wears a tweed jacket, slacks,
and sneakers, the picture of a software executive.
For someone with so little patience for human failing, his
management style is fairly loose, though clearly his employees
are deferential to him. At a Mathematica design review, he flirts
with sarcasm - "Why would anyone want to do this?" he says of a
proposed feature - but listens to the answer and finally
concludes that the proposal is impressive. "I wouldn't have been
here for 11 years if he was the terror that people say he is,"
says marketing exec Jean Buck, who assumes a maternal tolerance
toward the quirks of her employer. (She finds it humorous that
when she told her boss she'd be busy on Super Bowl Sunday, he
asked, "What's that?") The 300 people at Wolfram Research know
they are free to act independently, but only in the spirit of
their leader. Though during the Internet boom some hoped that
Wolfram Research would go public, Theo Gray, a scientist who
helped Wolfram form the business, says that was never a
possibility. "It wouldn't be Stephen's company then," he says.
Later in the day, I meet with a group who assisted Wolfram on A
New Kind of Science. There are perhaps a dozen people in the
room, and like prisoners shown the open gate after serving a long
sentence, everybody is a little stunned that the book is actually
finished. There are fact checkers, proofreaders, graphics
specialists, PhDs who helped run the computer experiments, the
art director, the production manager - a disparate collection who
were part scientific staff, part publishing staff. Each day,
while Wolfram was sleeping, this contingent would be busily
generating graphics, securing permissions, and looking for the
perfect photograph of broccoli. (One tells a story of when
Wolfram rejected a picture of a panther "because it had a funny
expression.") As the book got bigger, there were conflicts over
how to handle its complexity. At one point there was actually a
debate about whether there should be notes to the notes.
In some ways, A New Kind of Science was run like a software
project. The work was always to be delivered as a digitally
typeset file with all the graphics included: one massive load of
bits. So instead of drafts, there were frequent "builds," some of
them buggier than others. There were alpha versions and beta
versions. Some of the engineers are developing A New Kind of
Science Explorer, a PC application with a mini-Mathematica
program that allows people to run the experiments in the book and
begin to do research projects of their own. Wolfram feels very
strongly that "his" kind science is one through which amateurs
will unearth major discoveries, and he has been thinking of
various ways to assist them.
Suddenly, it occurs to me that someone might be missing in this
group. "Who actually edited the book?" I ask. There is a puzzled
silence in the room. An editor? Finally Wolfram says, "No one."
Except, of course, the author. Later on, he explains. "I think in
terms of 'This is my book and I'm fully responsible for it.'"
After Wolfram's day at his software company, we drive through
town to a nondescript steak, chicken, and salad house in Urbana
to continue our discussion. I ask him what he thinks the reaction
will be to A New Kind of Science. He doesn't guess, and in a
sense doesn't care. "I think when I started this project I was
still very interested in saying, 'What will other people think?'
After a while I realized, 'Why am I really doing this? Is it
really worth my while to spend 10 years of my life doing
something to get other people to say positive things about it?'
No, it's not. Absolutely not. And actually, from some very
cynical point of view, my opinion of the world at large isn't
high enough for me really to be interested in what they have to
say."
So when people complain - and they will - that Wolfram's "new
kind of science" is built not on proofs but on looking at
computer readouts, he'll see their complaints as the howling of
dinosaurs. "They'll probably talk derisively about little
programs and games," he says. "But it's not really engagement,
it's like, 'Let's just hope it goes away.' It's like the print
publishers hoping the Web goes away." He prefers to take the long
view. He's absolutely confident that his work is sound and is
ready to let people absorb it over a period of decades. He
believes that in each area he discusses, other researchers will
confirm his findings. He thinks that eventually the principle of
computational equivalence will be as commonly accepted as
gravity. Meanwhile, he says, his main concern is that people
actually read the book, and he professes to fear not those who
will attack him but bandwagon-riders who will scan a chapter or
two and then generate garbage based on their misimpressions.
As the meal progresses, our talk turns to an enigma that is
almost certainly a computational equivalent of the mysteries of
the universe: Wolfram himself. I point out that in a strange way,
this 1,200-page tome with pictures and diagrams of computer
experiments and animal skins and seashells and axioms is an
extremely personal book. Presented in the guise of science are
passionate contentions about religion and free will and the
nature of humanity. The discoveries track its author's
obsessions. In a sense, A New Kind of Science is Stephen
Wolfram's autobiography.
"There are definitely elements of expression there," he admits.
"I think 10, 15 years ago, I could not have done a decent job.
I've seen more of people's lives now. Back then, I would have
said, 'I don't care about theology, that's not my thing.' But as
I kept looking at the historical context, I started realizing
that I actually did care about these things and had something to
say about them."
The book also is arguably a rite of passage for him as a man.
When I first met Wolfram in 1984, he insouciantly dissed his
parents' careers. "I've never read [my father's] novels.... They
get good reviews, but they don't sell terribly many copies," he
told me. Ironically, A New Kind of Science is not just a
scientific excursion but also a literary excursion. Like James
Joyce, Wolfram believes his ideal reader is one who will devote a
lifetime to reading his book, and like Joyce the novelist,
Stephen Wolfram (a novelist's son) has produced an encyclopedic
world.
If the expression of the book represents his father's craft, the
application of his ideas to the riddles of human existence
reflects the concerns of his mother, the Oxford philosophy
professor, who died in 1993. Back in 1984, he said of her, "I
have no idea what she does, and the only consequence of her being
in that profession is that I will never consider doing anything
that's labeled philosophy." But A New Kind of Science is nothing
if not a book on philosophy. One of his friends suggests it
should be called Principia Computatus. And in another irony not
lost on the author, Wolfram's research led him to a textbook on
logic written by his mother. "I actually cared about the answers
to the questions," he says.
I think back to Wolfram as a brash, trash-talking 25-year-old.
Now he's a family man ("Having kids has made him much more of a
human being," says a Wolfram Research exec) whose new work, while
as iconoclastic as ever, turns out to be a homecoming for him, an
outcome that seemed totally unpredictable. Only by nature running
its inscrutable computations could the result become apparent.
As dessert is served, I bring up the secret-of-the-universe
question.
Wolfram's theory that
there is a single rule at the heart of everything - a single
simple algorithm that, in effect, generates all the rules of
physics and everything else - is bound to be one of his most
controversial claims, a theory that even some of his close
friends in physics aren't buying.
Furthermore, Wolfram
rubs our faces in the dreary implications of his contention. Not
only does a single measly rule account for everything, but
if one day we actually
see the rule, he predicts, we'll probably find it unimpressive.
"One might expect," he writes, "that in the end there would be
nothing special about the rule for our universe - just as there
has turned out to be nothing special about our position in the
solar system or the galaxy."
I have some trouble with this.
"I've got to ask you," I say. "How long do you envision this rule
of the universe to be?"
"I'm guessing it's really very short."
"Like how long?"
"I don't know. In Mathematica, for example, perhaps three, four lines of
code.(!!)
"Four lines of code?"
"That's what I'm guessing. I mean, I don't really know, but I
think there's no obvious evidence that it's any longer than that.
Now, in a sense, it will be short if Mathematica was a
well-designed language. It will be longer if it doesn't happen to
be as well-designed, in the sense that that doesn't happen to be
the way the universe works. But we're not looking at 25,000 lines
of code or something. We're looking at a handful of lines of
code."
"So it's not like Windows?"
"No." Wolfram laughs. "It's not like Windows. It's going to be
something small, I think. I've certainly wondered. You ask about
the theological questions and things. I think there will be a
time when one will sort of hold those lines of code in one's
hand, and that is the universe. And what does this mean? You
know, how do we then feel about things, if this whole thing is
just five lines of code or something? And in a sense, that is a
very unsatisfying conclusion, that sort of everything that's
going on, everything out there, is all just this five lines of
code we're running."
There is a moment of silence between us. In the background are
the clatter of dishes and silverware, noises that come from a
restaurant in Urbana, Illinois, preparing for closing time. The
mundane but complex stuff of equivalent computational processes.
"Well," I say finally, "I guess we'd feel really bad if it wasn't
well-written."
Wolfram grins. "Yes, right."
Another pause. "So do you believe we'll find this code in your
lifetime?"
"I hope so. Yeah."
"Do you want to find it?"
"Sure. That'd be nice."
"Is that your next thing to do?"
The self-styled Newton of our times smiles, as if to himself.
"I'd like to think about that. Yeah."
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