To my surprise I did searches on the title of the book, and on Wolfram, and didn't find anything posted on this on FR, considering it's a known genius claiming to have figured out the entire universe.
I'm actually thinking of ordering the book.. shockingly cheap at $44. I was skeptical but read a lot of the sample pages at Wolfram's site.
The FR God-squadders are gonna hate this even more than evolution; in a Wired interview (links to media about the book on Wolfram's site) Wolfram says that he thinks the program for the entire Universe will end up being about 5 lines of code.
1 posted on
05/28/2002 3:59:27 PM PDT by
John H K
To: John H K
Wolfram says that he thinks the program for the entire Universe will end up being about 5 lines of code. When he gets it down to one, he can call it God.
And even then, he won't have invented it, just discovered it.
2 posted on
05/28/2002 4:04:54 PM PDT by
IronJack
To: John H K
bump
To: John H K
You might check out the reader reviews at Amazon before shelling out your dough. Most reviewers familiar with cellular automata said there was little new in the book.
7 posted on
05/28/2002 4:29:08 PM PDT by
BigBobber
To: John H K
To my surprise I did searches on the title of the book, and on Wolfram, and didn't find anything posted on this on FR, considering it's a known genius claiming to have figured out the entire universe.You should also search in "General Interest":
Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" Now Available!
8 posted on
05/28/2002 4:29:42 PM PDT by
Physicist
To: John H K
Very good find! Order to Chaos and back to Order again. I can't wait to read this. If it's as appealing as it appears to be I may have to add it to my list of treasured books.
13 posted on
05/28/2002 4:40:25 PM PDT by
callisto
To: John H K
Science-types are almost all alike. Explain the universe any possible way, except for the obvious one. God.
A theory that the Universe was created by a group of muskrats playing rock-paper-scissors is preferable to being humble enough to admit the existence of a Creator. Because that would mean the scientists aren't the smartest thing in the universe. And that would, evidently, take all the fun out of being a science-creep.
17 posted on
05/28/2002 4:52:24 PM PDT by
berned
To: John H K
He sure has a lot of neat pictures in his book. How those patterns turn into life though is not answered unless one considers snow flakes and other interesting shapes in nature to be capable of turning into a genetic code somehow.
To: John H K
Sounds like Conway's Game of Life
(i.e. another version of the Turing machine)
hyped up to give Wolfram some more publicity
so that he can sell more of his overpriced software.
27 posted on
05/28/2002 5:28:47 PM PDT by
Nogbad
To: John H K
He's describing kudzo -- the weed that is taking over the world
To: John H K
shoulda-coulda named the book: The Old Hubris
To: John H K
This sounds a lot like the morphology off-shoots to evolution.
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".
To: John H K
Instead of black and white....DNA has 4 building blocks. I wonder if he treats this in his book.
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