Word: wolfram
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Those ideas had their genesis in the early 1980s, when Wolfram began to explore a type of computer program called a cellular automaton. It typically consists of a row of black and white pixels on a computer screen--the "cells"--and a simple rule for transforming that row into a new one. A rule might go like this: If a pixel in a given position is flanked by pixels of its opposite color, reverse its color when drawing the corresponding pixel in the next row; if not, keep it the same. By automatically applying the rule on each...
...they know. This week Wolfram is publishing A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media), a 1,200-page tome, some two decades in the making, that claims to redefine the foundations of virtually every branch of science, from physics and mathematics to biology and even psychology. "Stephen is not a modest man," says Terrence Sejnowski, director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., who is an avid Wolfram watcher. "But his ideas could turn out to be extremely important...
...scientific phenomena--the subatomic trails emerging from a particle accelerator, the diagrams of curved space-time that arise from Einstein's equations, the spread of evolutionary changes in organisms through time, the graphic equivalent of different kinds of mathematical logic. "Under every conceptual rock I turned over," says Wolfram, "there's been this amazing wildlife I never expected to find...
...with the fact that conventional equations can describe only the simplest natural phenomena (you can write an equation for the orbit of a single planet around the sun, for example, but not for an entire solar system, let alone a living cell), the success of his simple programs made Wolfram suspect that science has been heading in the wrong direction for the past 300 years or so. Instead of trying to write complicated equations for everything, he says, scientists should have been searching instead for the cellular automata that correspond to what they are observing...
...bold claim, even for someone as brilliant as Wolfram. And for now, nobody can really say whether it's right or wrong. The fact that some of Wolfram's patterns resemble things in nature suggests that the world may really work as his programs do. And the more precise the resemblance, the more seriously scientists take...