A new kind of science

A few years ago Stephen Wolfram published a book called A new kind of science (NKS). Both the man and the book cause a strong split in people's opinions. Some claim him to be a genius and others dismiss him as a megalomaniac crackpot. Some claim that the book represents the dawn of a new scientific era, whereas others dismiss it as a derivative work with nothing new to offer. As for me, I don't really pay much attention to what people say, because idle chatter is mostly heresay. I judge things by their demonstrable benefit, and for a book that means I judge it subjectively by the new ideas that it gives me.

I originally read the whole of NKS fairly quickly to get the gist of what it said. I already had many of its concepts on board, which helped this speed-reading along. Since then I have delved into selected areas of the book when I realised how the ideas that they held might be applied to my own work on self-organising networks. Usually, I use this book in "pick and mix" mode, where I mine it for concepts rather than complete solutions.

My subjective assessment of the book is that it is invaluable for me, because it has allowed me to enlarge the toolbox of scientific techniques that I use in my work. Objectively, I am sure that most (and perhaps all) of these ideas were already available somewhere in the literature, but then I am told that needles can be found in haystacks if you look hard enough. The key point is that a lot of interesting ideas are contained in the NKS book, and they are repeated many times just in case you don't get the message the first time. I certainly find that thinking in the NKS cellular automaton style gives me a usefully different viewpoint, which I can use to augment rather than inhibit my understanding.

I don't have much time for the scientific snobs who dismiss SW because of his personal and his scientific style. I think it all makes him a rather fascinating character.