A Man Who Would Shake Up Science
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Some images on the back jacket of Stephen Wolfram's 1,197-page tome, 
"A New Kind of Science," are familiar: a splash of liquid, jets of 
gas, sea anemone, ancient mosaics and mollusk shells. But others 
become understandable only after working through ideas in this 
much-awaited book: spindly sketches of leaves and snowflakes, 
a baroque lacework of light, schematic diagrams that waver under 
the gaze. 

Many of these images, created by Mr. Wolfram, are ghostlike 
reductions of familiar objects, skeletal representations of 
processes that may lie beneath natural forms. And they were 
produced during a decade of work that was kept hidden from 
professional scrutiny. 

Now Mr. Wolfram is finally publishing his work, and his claims 
surpass the most extravagant speculation. He 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. 
"I have discovered vastly more than I ever thought possible," 
Mr. Wolfram writes in the book's preface, "and in fact what I 
have done now touches almost every existing area of science, 
and quite a bit besides." 

These might seem the claims of a semimystical scientific crank. 
After all, the book is being published (on Tuesday) not by a 
university press but by Mr. Wolfram's own company (Wolfram Media 
Inc.), and he has insisted on secrecy in a scientific world used 
to peer review and public conferences. But secrecy and grandiosity 
have also accompanied major scientific works .

Terrence Sejnowski, who directs the Computational Neurobiology 
Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La 
Jolla, Calif., has found Mr. Wolfram's work useful for designing 
computer simulations of nerve cells and synapses. He has called 
Mr. Wolfram "the smartest scientist on the planet." 

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. 

Mr. Wolfram freely confesses to a high opinion of his
accomplishments. In a recent interview, he explained
that if he were more modest he would be less clear
and less successful. "Ultimately," he said of his
book, "confidence is necessary in order to undertake
a project of this size." Its goal is to change the
very direction of scientific research. He ranks one
of his discoveries about complexity among the most
important "in the whole history of theoretical
science." 

But because Mr. Wolfram has been so secretive, he has
shown his work only to a small circle of selected
colleagues. Gregory J. Chaitin, a mathematician at
IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.,
for example, who has read the book, said in an
interview that he was convinced of its importance but
anticipated controversy: "Stephen has gone out on a
limb. He is proposing a paradigm shift. A new twist
on everything." It will take months, even years,
before all the thorough, independent professional
assessments are in, which should not be surprising
given Mr. Wolfram's undertaking. 

He really is proposing, as the book's title puts it,
a "new kind of science." He wants to displace the
projects and theories and priorities that now
characterize academic science. And he refuses to be
limited by disciplinary boundaries or by the
assertions of experts in other fields. "No doubt," he
writes, "this book will draw the ire" of some of
them. "I think I was a somewhat brash teenage
scientist," Mr. Wolfram said, adding that he still
seems to affect people the same way. 

As a colleague once put it, Mr. Wolfram has "stepped
on a lot of toes." Tensions arose in many
institutional settings before he set out on his own.
In the early 1980's, there was even a court battle
with Caltech over ownership of computer software
designed by Mr. Wolfram. In addition, Mr. Wolfram
noted, when he began his work on complexity he
confidently expected others to follow through on his
suggestions; instead, he bluntly said, without his
leadership the field did "horribly, horribly." Such
frustrations, he explained, eventually convinced him
to design an alternative scientific career, founding
his own company and pursuing his interests without
any need for grants or support. 

This independence is even reflected in the book's
style. It requires, Mr. Wolfram writes, "no
specialized scientific or other knowledge to follow."
Mathematical formulas are eliminated; illustrations
predominate; professional prose is avoided. 

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.

Such cellular automata are at the heart of this book,
for Mr. Wolfram argues that many complex processes -
the movements of a fluid, the shapes of leaves, the
patterns on a mollusk shell - can, in fact, be
modeled by simple programs like cellular automata.

Such elementary programs, he suggests, can even be
used to explain the nature of space and time or
outline the vagaries of visual perception. Existing
mathematics and physics, Mr. Wolfram argues, are
inadequate to the task.

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. Indeed, the
universe itself, he argues, is generated by such
rules. He presents an example of one cellular
automaton program that produces such sophisticated
patterns that it can act like a powerful computer. 

The details are highly technical, but this automaton
can actually replicate other processes and patterns
just as a computer can be turned into a
word-processor one minute and a game machine the
next. It has what are called "universal" properties.

Hypothetically, the movement of cigarette smoke in
the air could be mirrored by such a seemingly simple
cellular automaton; so could the processes of the
human brain. In fact, such powerful "computers," Mr.
Wolfram says, are far more plentiful, even in the
natural world, than has ever been thought. Moreover,
he argues that all universal computing systems are
equivalent; no calculating machine can be more
powerful, no computer more sophisticated than the
cellular automaton Mr. Wolfram describes. This
insight alone, he claims, "has vastly richer
implications" than "any single collection of laws in
science." 

And indeed, this principle, as asserted by Mr.
Wolfram, leads to a startling conclusion. Scientists
are accustomed to analyzing some systems by
discovering abstract principles that can describe
their behavior. Kepler's laws, for example, can
predict and describe the motion of the planets. But
some extraordinarily complex processes - like,
perhaps, the curl of cigarette smoke - cannot be
encompassed by such a law; for that law would require
one "universal" computational system to be more
powerful than another.

So all we can do in such cases is discover the simple
rules that give birth to the complexity, the rules
that act like the striking of the match before smoke
begins to rise. Everything else - the position and
density of smoke at a particular time and under
certain conditions - can be found only by
"experiment": the process must run its course. There
are limits to the powers of science to generalize and
predict.

Mr. Wolfram spins out elaborate speculations based on
these ideas - suggestions about free will, the
structure of space, the nature of mathematics. "There
is so much in the book," Mr. Sejnowski said, "that it
will be years, literally years, before people
assimilate it." Meanwhile, reactions to Mr. Wolfram,
he believes, will be "all over the map."

Mr. Wolfram is sanguine: "I am quite certain this is
going to work. I have never deluded myself before."









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