Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science”

Few months ago, I at last bought my copy of “A New Kind of Science” by Stephen Wolfram (ISBN 1-57955-008-8). I expect to finish reading the entire book few months from now, and then go on to reading other books.

The book fulfilled my expectations of being interesting and intellectually stimulating book.

The first observation, which I made from reading the book was that Wolfram’s thesis kills the basic premise of Intelligent Design. It IS possible to create complexity out of simplicity. It makes me wonder when will the book be banned in USA by the Creationist and Intelligent Design adherents.

There are several Web sites associated with Stephen Wolfram’s ideas, and a full list exists in http://www.wolfram.com/webresources.html.

I had a brief look into some of them.

  • http://www.stephenwolfram.com/ – Stephen Wolfram’s biography and other personal information.
  • http://www.wolfram-media.com/ – Details about Stephen Wolfram’s printed publications – books and journal articles.
  • http://www.wolfram.com/ – Mathematica.
  • http://www.wolframscience.com/ – dedicated to the book “A New Kind of Science” and associated merchandise, such as Notes in bigger font, a collection of related papers, and software for exploring the ideas expoused in the book.
  • http://forum.wolframscience.com/ – The NKS Forum
    There are few forums, and they appear to be active – the most recent message in each of them was between 1-4 days old. The forums discuss topics such as:

    • NKS, quantum theory, and hidden variables
    • Beating the Lotto
    • Mechanical Gravity Theory
    • Modeling the Debugging Process
    • Cellular Automata World Record?
    • Hyper-operations
    • John von Neumann’s box
    • The Mozart Problem
    • Unknown ancient(sacred)geometry
  • http://blog.wolfram.com/ – Stephen Wolfram’s Blog.

There are also some Wikipedia articles about Stephen Wolfram and his ideas:

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.