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A New Kind of Science

3.48 of 5 stars 3.48 · rating details · 644 ratings · 67 reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review

Since the 1970s, emerging discoveries about chaos, complexity, and randomness have tantalized just about everyone clued in to the intellectual currents of the age. Are these discoveries mere "toys" or harbingers of an entirely new worldview? If you were smart and wealthy enough to pursue these issues as your life work, you'd be Stephen Wolfram....more

Hardcover, 1197 pages

Published January 1st 2002 by Wolfram Media (first published June 1st 1997)

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May 02, 2011 Hadrian rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, mathematics, computer-science, technology, philosophy, science

Dear FSM, what a rambling mess of a book. This review is going to be longer than usual for me, as I have a lot of bile to get out of my system.

As I read through the first several pages, I was bemused by the author's arrogant and lofty tone. I was willing to give him a bit of credit, if he had any logical backup behind it.

Finished the introduction. The book makes clear its intentions: to analyze and reduce complex phenomenon to simple mathematical representations. Not bad, but hardly revolutiona...more

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Aug 03, 2008 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a really intriguing book. There is much to like about it, especially the chapter notes in the back, where he goes into a lot of historical background on the development of symbolic logic and the attempt to formalize mathematical operations in the late 1800s by Russell and Whitehead, among others. Wolfram's computational approach to analysis has some definite advantages over more conventional axiomatic methods, and has led to some powerful intuitions. However, I think the author tries to...more

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Jan 15, 2013 Rees evans rated it 5 of 5 stars

I don't normally write reviews about books on good reads. But new kind of science is a special case. It is a special case, because so many negative things instead about Wolfram and his work. Whatever you say about Wolfram, one has to admit that the creation and development Mathematica was an accomplishment of great importance. Moreover, Wolfram has done a great deal of work even prior to Mathematica in the area of one-dimensional cellular automata.

New Kind of Science extends that work and makes...more

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Nov 27, 2012 Allan rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm capable of holding conflicting thoughts. Yes, it's a rare book on science that peer review doesn't improve--yet at the same time, some diversity at the margins of peer review is entirely salutary.

I harbour a healthy disrespect for peer review as the worst form of quality control, except for all the others. Peer review has an unfortunate tendency to crush what it can't improve or subsume. Excellence of a population can be increased by subtracting undistinguished individuals, without increasi...more I'm capable of holding conflicting thoughts. Yes, it's a rare book on science that peer review doesn't improve--yet at the same time, some diversity at the margins of peer review is entirely salutary.

I harbour a healthy disrespect for peer review as the worst form of quality control, except for all the others. Peer review has an unfortunate tendency to crush what it can't improve or subsume. Excellence of a population can be increased by subtracting undistinguished individuals, without increasing the supply of excellence whatsoever. This is not as often noted by the defenders of peer review as it ought to be.

Perhaps Stephen Wolfram's soul could have been saved by working within the establishment. I don't doubt this. But if he wishes not to, I'll take his book for what it's worth on its own terms. For my purposes, I consider Mathematica a halfway passable surrogate. Working code is a harsh mistress. In particular, his success at solving the constraint based system near the end of chapter five is non-trivial. As mechanical verification of theorems improves, the creative mathematician will seek peer review for exposition and clarity, but not correctness.

I happen to regard the discovery of complexity originating from nowhere as one of the most important ideas ever. Maddening irregularity was already apparent with the Sieve of Eratosthenes, though I suspect the Greeks underestimated the deeply intractable nature of the prime density function. We also have complexity from Podunk in the ability to construct modern digital computers from nothing more than a nor gate (it can even self-clock if you set up a clock loop). So really, what does rule 30 or rule 110 add to this picture? Having read half the book, I remain unsure.

Wolfram's main thesis seems to be that we should accept the complexity that we get from these simple systems as sufficient (if properly applied) to capture most of the complexity we observe in nature. In particular he admonishes us not to complicate our systems in order to replicate complex behaviour. Well, yes, if this works. But does it always work?

There are many physicists out there who profess to be disappointed that the recently confirmed Higgs fits the standard model so well as it seems to. No new physics. Boring. As if the world were constructed as our playpen. We tend to have a companion bias that an analytic solution is a good solution. We expend much energy finding analytic solutions, because analytic solutions are the type of solutions we wish to have. I think this is what Wolfram means by a "kind" of science, that there's much additional understanding we can squeeze out of the natural world if we relax our obsession with analytic forms. If evolution doesn't restrict itself to analytic forms, why should we?

Certainly, we're limiting ourselves if we don't accept nature as it is. But it's also, I suspect, a big step down in the potency of the understanding gained. I wish Wolfram had tackled this "big step" more directly. Fundamentally, I found the book evasive. Would peer review have fixed this problem? I don't know.
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Dec 07, 2011 Amy rated it 5 of 5 stars

I sometimes read the behavior of a class 4 two-dimensional cellular automaton often known in recreational computing as the Game of Life

I always take the title, A New Kind of Science—a book on cellular automata by “outsider” scientist Stephen Wolfram that I sometimes read—in much the same way as I take the titles of Ken Wilbur’s books, A Theory of Everything and A Brief History of Everything; that is, as An Old Kind of Marketing, one that’s aimed at the reader’s undiscerning desires to have compl...more I sometimes read the behavior of a class 4 two-dimensional cellular automaton often known in recreational computing as the Game of Life

I always take the title, A New Kind of Science—a book on cellular automata by “outsider” scientist Stephen Wolfram that I sometimes read—in much the same way as I take the titles of Ken Wilbur’s books, A Theory of Everything and A Brief History of Everything; that is, as An Old Kind of Marketing, one that’s aimed at the reader’s undiscerning desires to have complexity synthesized. If one were to embody complexity with their book title they might be more like Emily Dickinson, forgoing titles for their texts as if to say, I will not Synthesize or summarize—the content as if the Title—is a container—and the Content contained. If Wolfram were Dickinson, his book would be identified by its first line: Three centuries ago science was transformed by the dramatic new idea that rules based on mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural world. If there were no titles, authors would presumably make their first sentence the most emblematic, since this is how others would refer to their books. In Wolfram’s case, he might choose something “random” like I will on page 249, a fragment referring to a photo: the behavior of a class 4 two-dimensional cellular automaton often known in recreational computing as the Game of Life. Readers might say, “There is no way I am going to get through all 1197 pages of the behavior of a class 4 two-dimensional cellular automaton often known in recreational computing as the Game of Life.” Wolfram might say, “In the 1197 pages of the behavior of a class 4 two-dimensional cellular automaton often known in recreational computing as the Game of Life, I propose a new kind of science.” These sentences are more complex than, “In A New Kind of Science, I work with the idea that rules based on mathematical equations can be used to describe the natural world,” because, in the untitled title sentence, there is no verb clause, and the untethered articles and prepositions of the sentence using the untitled title sentence grammatically allow for more. The untitled title sentence embodies some of the complexity that was previously contained by its thoughtless container, which, in this re-imagining, spills out onto itself. I sometimes read the behavior of a class 4 two-dimensional cellular automaton often known in recreational computing as the Game of Life.
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Oct 20, 2010 Hobbes rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book, at about 5,643 pages, was a fascinating read. Wolfram unveils a new way of thinking about how the world works. To this less intelligent mind it looked more like an outgrowth of the chaos movement than something entirely new but whatever it is, and however correct it is, there's no question that Wolfram did move some horizons back. Unfortunately the other message he seems to want to communicate is how amazing Stephen Wolfram is, and the ego can get in the way of the science through-out...more This book, at about 5,643 pages, was a fascinating read. Wolfram unveils a new way of thinking about how the world works. To this less intelligent mind it looked more like an outgrowth of the chaos movement than something entirely new but whatever it is, and however correct it is, there's no question that Wolfram did move some horizons back. Unfortunately the other message he seems to want to communicate is how amazing Stephen Wolfram is, and the ego can get in the way of the science through-out this voluminous work.

There's extensive use of graphics through-out the book which is immensely helpful to understanding what exactly it is that he's trying to say. As I understand it, Wolfram under-priced the book by personally subsidizing each copy himself in hopes that more would by it. At around $50 a pop it's not exactly cheap but based on the content I still believe this claim. Highly detailed images adorn every other page and the amount of research done is beyond question. There's a lot of repetition, but the repetition is always at least phrased in new ways as if to help us understand rather than fill space.

I'm attempting to avoid the actual scientific thought put forward in this book mostly because it takes Wolfram tens of thousand of words to lay it out and I feel almost disrespectful trying to accomplish that in a sentence or two but I suppose it would be of value to someone trying to decide if they would like to read it. The central theme is the idea of complex results emerging from very simple laws and inputs. This sounds a lot like chaos theory but the level of simplicity he demonstrates leading to truly complex results is quite astounding. There is a great deal of work gone to trying to show this theory in the realm of science, incorporating it into the fields we're familiar with. Computational equivalency plays a large role as he attempts to show that these findings aren't a dead-end but a real possibility for new discovery.

For those who are somewhat interested but not sold I would recommend finding it somewhere (library, friend's house) and reading the first chapter. That contains much of content of the rest of the book, and gives a good feeling for how it will read. If you don't like it you know to read the rest but will probably have learned some important lessons anyways in the reading. If you do then get your hands on the whole book. As a warning, this one could be tough to make it through in the time you're likely to have if you get it from a library.(less)

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Jan 09, 2012 Kartik rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: pop-sci

Wolfram claims that discrete systems following simple rules can model complicated systems in biology, chemistry and physics.

Well, this has been known for a long long time. Anyone doing computational science (physics, chemistry or biology) knows that most systems (generally differential equations) can be discretized and fed into computers to simulate. These simulations of course have a limit to their accuracy since they are discrete versions of more realistic continuous systems.

Wolfram seems to i...more

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Jul 13, 2009 Alex Covic rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: science students, physicians, mathematicians, computer-nerds, hackers,

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Wonderfully printed, easy to read, marvelous to look at, pretentious piece of quack.

It was hard to pass the Introduction and the first Chapter, when you hear the author praising himself, his own importance and why literally 'everybody' in science and why science itself is 'wrong' and did not 'see' what very self-aware author sees, but nobody else.

The book is a massive piece of rarely to find print. I was self-published by the author to assure the quality of the printing. It has many black-and-w...more Wonderfully printed, easy to read, marvelous to look at, pretentious piece of quack.

It was hard to pass the Introduction and the first Chapter, when you hear the author praising himself, his own importance and why literally 'everybody' in science and why science itself is 'wrong' and did not 'see' what very self-aware author sees, but nobody else.

The book is a massive piece of rarely to find print. I was self-published by the author to assure the quality of the printing. It has many black-and-white Illustrations and pictures to accompany the text. The text, when it is not about self-praising, is rather easy to read and easy to understand for non-academics. So what is it about?

It talks about the 'big' picture in nature and science. Stephen Wolfram is a well known 'Wunderkind' in theoretical physics. He made his PhD in 1979 at the age of 20. In the mid-1980s he founded Wolfram Research Inc. and invented 'Mathematica' the leading software for technical computing and symbolic programming.

Wolframs main thesis of the book and the solution he offers are easy to understand:

"... very simple programs produce great complexity. For all it takes is that systems in nature operate like typical programs and then it follows that their behavior will often be complex. And the reason that such complexity is not usually seen in human artifacts is just that in building these we tend in effect to use programs that are specially chosen to give only behavior simple enough for us to be able to see that it will achieve the purposes we want" page 3

This is the crux of the book, there, luckily on page 3.

If you read the 12 Chapters (846 pages plus around 250 pages of notes and additional massive Index, than it is most likely, that you do it because you like an intellectual exercise or because you love books and don't mind the many times annoying voice.

I am not going to discuss the results of such a vast amount of research and work that went into proving and verifying his idea. There are plenty of scientists from his fellow theoretical physics to mathematicians and others that reviewed and challenged Wolfram's book over the past years. There is even a great discussion a the slashdot-forum that mocks the authors writing and is funny and hilarious to read for nerds like me. May reviews and articles are online and it is easy to find them, if you want to.

Beyond the Masters Voice, this is a lovely book to look at. An artifact in these times of trash-quality publishing. It is not a masterpiece of printing. You cannot compare it with bibliophile editions. But for science books, if you have seen a physical copy of it, it is more on the upside, which tells you where we are nowadays, when it comes to print.

There is a complete online-version of this book now available for free on the Wolfram Research Homepage. The whole thing. For the curious minds.(less)

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May 05, 2012 John Davis rated it 4 of 5 stars

I have to admit that I did not read the 1000 plus pages. The idea of cellular automata is interesting, so I programmed some of his examples for fun. He is not a crank and has done serious scientific work, which I am not competent to judge. There is a measure of jealousy in some of the comments by his peers, since he has made a comfortable income from Mathematica. He bought his own Cray computer to play with. The most damaging review was, referring to the title: "What is new is not science; what...more

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Sep 09, 2010 Ronny rated it 1 of 5 stars

More like "A New Kind of Ego".

Wolfram's inflated ego dominated this book so much that I found it unreadable and started skimming. What's worse is his self-aggrandizement is undeserved. Wolfram did not discover Cellular Automata, nor was he the first to see potential in them, so basically he's a pretender. In addition, others who have worked in this field have written without the egotism.

The book is short on content. There was some info there, but nothing to justify the title or the bloated lengt...more

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Nov 23, 2012 Chris Reid rated it 3 of 5 stars

I desperately wanted to love this book, and I'm glad I slogged through it; however, there didn't appear to be much here that hadn't been articulated better elsewhere, earlier, and with arguably more grounding. If Wolfram wanted to associate himself with these ideas he would've been better off writing a biography than this sprawling treatise. He's clearly brilliant, and part of me hopes (for the sake of the story) that we're all missing something, but as it stands A New Kind of Science is merely...more

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Jan 30, 2009 Patrick rated it 3 of 5 stars

Some nice interesting stuff, but REALLY verbose and self-important.

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Sep 28, 2010 Jono rated it 3 of 5 stars

I find his initial propositions that complexity is more common than we think compelling enough, and the pictures are somewhat enthralling. The entire lack of defining terms (what is complexity, anyway, or how is it measured, even heuristically), though, and also the penchant for overstating the importance or novelty of his findings, eventually became too much for me about halfway through the book, or page 480.
There may be much merit in the book that I couldn't get to, but it is certainly a mixe...more

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May 07, 2008 Robert rated it 4 of 5 stars

Wow, this is a huge book. It's fascinating and infuriating and did I mention huge. There are two main issues I have with the book. The first is the way that Wolfram dismisses natural selection as a significant force in evolution. He argues that biological systems couldn't possibly become optimized for a purpose based on this kind of random search. It's an argument that's close to Intelligent Design... organisms aren't perfect, and they're not in any sense trying to be. The second issue is the su...more

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Apr 03, 2008 Anna added it

Shelves: science

The creator of Mathematica presents the results of his last 10 or 15 years’ worth of work. Much of the book centers around cellular automata, which demonstrate that simple processes (not necessarily complex ones) can produce complex, even apparently random, results. Cellular automata and this idea are then applied to biology, physics, space and time, and probably other things I’m forgetting. Some parts are fairly interesting, and there are some impressive-looking pictures. However, I don’t think...more

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Mar 19, 2009 Alex rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. A fascinating book to read. The computer scientist in me finds Wolfram's approach absolutely credible and spine-chillingly tantalizing. We could learn so much from this. Truth be told, though, I'm not qualified to judge how much potential Wolfram's ideas have in real world science, and while reading, one wonders whether this is the work of contemporary genius on the scale of a new Einstein (for that's what it feels like — reading Wolfram's shockingly straightforward approach to science is like s...more

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Oct 24, 2010 Ben rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: science

Pascal is famously quoted (paraphrased):

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

If Stephen Wolfram worked on this tome for about a decade, I hate to see what he cut it down from.

Even for a book written so as to be approachable by non-technical lay readers, this book is excessively repetitive, and verbose, and repetitive. 200 pages in and I've yet to read anything that I could identify as shockingly new or usefully foundational; nothing that I hadn't been exposed to by...more

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Feb 06, 2013 Warren Mcpherson rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a fun easy to read (but huge) book that gets you to think about how very simple algorithms can create fantastically complex results. The author has a giant ego, which is arguably justified but it turns many people off. The key is not to take it too seriously. Don't compare it to a revolutionary scientific tome, compare it to a Pixar movie. Let the book stimulate your brain and enjoy the sensation.

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Aug 10, 2009 Dman rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: No one, unfortunately.

Although clearly the material is developed by a brilliant mind, the book is poorly written and edited. It reads as if it were self-published without benefit of more knowledgeable minds in the publishing industry. As such, it becomes a purely egocentric compilation of electronic manipulations. It fails to communicate important ideas through sheer repetitive hysterical boredom.

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Aug 31, 2009 Kyle rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonlinearity-chaos

Boy, there are a lot of triangles in this book. :)

I was introduced to this book by way of a seminar class on nonlinearity and complexity, taught by Prof. Leon Chua in Berkeley EE. Chua produced a treatise as an answer to this Wolfram's NKS.

Chua's book is available from World Scientific.

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Mar 13, 2009 Nuphile rated it 4 of 5 stars

A bold attempt at revolutionizing scientific thought in the context of a computational world. Wolfram partially succeeds in this mission, though his arrogance seems to get in the way of his message, rather than support it. But in some ways it reminded me of Fuller's Synergetics. Not a long read, and well worth it.

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Apr 16, 2013 Henry rated it 4 of 5 stars

Interesting book for the mathematically inclined. The writing style can be tedious (often repetitive), not so much because it may be technical in nature.

A follow up would be interesting, to see how much has been accomplished pursuing the new kind of science the author propses...

Overall, I am glad I read it.

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Oct 08, 2012 Andrej Karpathy rated it 4 of 5 stars

this book is a mixed bag. You really have to selectively skim chapters that look interesting because you will never make it fully through. I thought some of the chapters had some very interesting results, however, and the notion of a computational universe is very intriguing and interesting.

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Mar 22, 2009 Armen Chakmakjian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-technology

I did read this at the turn of the century. It was quite interesting. you can see all kinds of patterns that eventually show up in nature (why cells reproduce in certain clusters based on factors...et cetera). This book tries to explain it.

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Jan 29, 2011 Brett Peppler rated it 5 of 5 stars

I'm a big fan of balls. I should explain that. I'm a big fan of having balls, in the metaphorical sense–of having the audacity, and the knowledge to back it up, to tell absolute giants of science, that, ah, you've kind of got it all wrong.

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Jun 10, 2013 Eric rated it 5 of 5 stars

The book makes advanced Math concepts accessible to anyone who has been through Jr. High School. In some ways it changed my concept of how the world works. Interactions between simple systems can create complex and interesting results.

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Oct 08, 2011 Brent Werness rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction-physics, non-fiction-math, non-fiction

Lots of interesting ideas and fascinating examples, but irritatingly written and often overly hyperbolic in his claims. Interesting, but I doubt it's a revolution in the making (and certainly not a revolution of his creation).

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Aug 26, 2009 Otis Morgan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Finally a way out of the valley of densely static scientific algorithms is explored. And the results look very promising. This looks like the work of a modern Einstein. http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/149

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Apr 28, 2010 Bo rated it 4 of 5 stars

Thick reading and repetitive, but necessary reading. Plus, what he's describing may be describing the underlying pattern or all reality. Cellular automata are everywhere.

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Dec 03, 2008 Ben rated it 5 of 5 stars

If you're a mega-nerd, you will like this book. Even a brief skimming will spark some interesting associations between nature and programming.

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