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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Recluse, maverick physicist and Mathematica developer Stephen Wolfram claims to have revolutionized science with his new, computer-based theories.
May 15, 2002 | Stephen Wolfram wants to bring science into the age of the computer. A boy genius turned multimillionaire scientist, Wolfram has been a veritable recluse for the last decade while developing his new approach to fundamental physics. He runs his software company, Wolfram Research, largely by videoconference calls from his home, allowing himself the latitude to pursue his research on the subject of complexity. He views the future of science as one dominated by the computer, one where scientists run experiments via the keyboard, unraveling the vast complexities of the natural world through relatively simple rules of programming.
Wolfram is a maestro of this new world, a Moby of a scientist who has looked deep into the standard way of doing science and who sees the sparkling of a new dawn. His just-published magnum opus, "A New Kind of Science," is his Principia, a response to the deterministic mathematics that Isaac Newton used to render science into a tidy picture of elliptical orbits and parabolic arcs, predictable to as many decimal points as you please.
If Einstein was the long-haired rocker whose theory of relativity overturned the staid, boring establishment, and Heisenberg a jazz fusionist who composed new tunes from discordant notes, Wolfram is a techno-pop artist who programs his machine to the new sounds he hears in his head. With this book he is inviting the rest of the world to move along to the beat.
Twenty years ago, Wolfram writes, the unexpected output of a computer program made him realize he had seen "the beginning of a crack in the very foundations of existing science, and a first clue towards a whole new kind of science." Although barely out of his teens at the time, he was already recognized as a genius -- he had published his first scientific paper at the age of 15, a study in particle physics titled "Hadronic Electrons?" He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech at the age of 20, and a year later became the youngest person ever to receive a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation (these are informally called "genius" grants).
"He's extremely smart, impressively smart," says Andrew Odlyzko, a friend of Wolfram's who worked with him 20 years ago on cellular automata. And Wolfram knew it. "He was certainly in his early days more than a little arrogant, which rubbed people the wrong way," Odlyzko says.
Marriage and children have smoothed Wolfram's rough spots over the years, and a big pile of money probably didn't hurt: He made millions off his development of the Mathematica software program, a versatile program that is used by millions, most of them scientists and engineers who use it to do symbolic and numerical mathematics.
With continued development, Wolfram expanded Mathematica into a programming language in its own right. "It's one of the most complete packages I've ever seen," says Flip Phillips, a professor of cognitive psychology at Skidmore College and editor of the Mathematica Journal. Wolfram initially developed Mathematica to evaluate complex equations in particle physics called Feynman diagrams, then turned the usual academic tables by founding a corporation to sell the product to his fellow academics.
His program and his company's success afforded him the opportunity to pursue his scientific interests unbeholden to the usual demands of academia -- the need for grants and the publish-or-perish treadmill. Wolfram writes that he resolved "just to keep working quietly until I had finished and was ready to present everything in a single coherent way."
But computer technology allows more than programming languages; to Wolfram, it makes a fundamentally new kind of science possible, just as the development of telescope technology made astronomy possible and microscope technology took biology beyond mere taxonomy. "Computers are not just limited to working out the consequences of mathematical equations," he says, whether they be Feynman diagrams or your checking account statements. Rather, studying the behavior of even the simplest programs reveals extremely complex behavior, as anyone who's tried to debug a piece of software knows.
Wolfram began his work, and begins his book, by analyzing cellular automata, a conceptual device invented by the Hungarian physicist John von Neumann for representing a complex system using an array of simple elements, such as squares on graph paper that can be colored either black or white. Starting with one initial black square, decide on a rule for how each of its neighbors will be colored in each step forward in time. Repeat the process indefinitely, moving forward one time frame after another. (John Conway's "Game of Life" is a famous example of a cellular automaton.)
