Arsip Piksi-L

["asep212" <asep212 @ somewhere.in.the.world>]

tampaknya luar biasa dan fantastis 
dari "http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?
xml=/connected/2002/05/15/ecfwolf15.xml&sSheet=/connected/2002/05/15/i
xconn.html"
atau "http://www.wolframscience.com/"

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Is this man bigger than Newton and Darwin? 
(Filed: 15/05/2002) 


British physicist Stephen Wolfram tells Graham Farmelo why his new 
book, already number one on Amazon.com, will revolutionise science


I have had some unusual meetings with scientists in my time, but 
never one like this. Here I am in a Boston restaurant with an 
accomplished physicist who matter-of-factly assures me that his new 
book will revolutionise science. Not just parts of science, but 
everything from the theory of evolution to the very nature of space 
and time. Industry will be different, too, he claims: "In 50 years' 
time, more new technology will be based on this new kind of science 
than on conventional science."

   
Click to enlarge 
My dining companion is Stephen Wolfram, physicist extraordinaire. I 
first met him at the California Institute of Technology in 1979, when 
he was a 20-year-old researcher, just beginning to focus his 
formidable creative energy on understanding new computer programs 
that were trying to take the pain out of mathematical problem-
solving. His brilliance and determination were awesome - everyone 
knew he was going places. But where to? Would he mature into a great 
scientist or into another of those sad wunderkinder, remembered less 
for their achievements than their unfulfilled potential?

In 1988, he released his Mathematica software, having set up his own 
company to develop and sell it to scientists and engineers. More than 
two million of them now use it as an indispensable tool for solving 
mathematical problems. For the past 11 years, he has continued to be 
his company's hands-on chief executive while privately pursuing a 
research programme. He has controversially chosen not take the usual 
route of writing up his work in papers submitted to fellow academics 
for peer review, but to publish it himself in a 1,197-page tome, A 
New Kind of Science, written for a lay audience as well as for 
scientists. It reached the bookstores yesterday in Britain and - amid 
a long-planned welter of publicity - in the United States.

When I met with Wolfram, now a portly 42-year-old, his magnum opus 
was safely at the printers. He was relaxed and chatty, looking 
forward to its publication. Genial but intense, he has the presence 
of a senior actor, articulating his words with a McKellenesque 
clarity, looking professorially over the top of his spectacles with 
eyes sparkling, like one of those good-natured buffers played so 
delightfully by Jim Broadbent. The only outward sign of Wolfram's 
solitude is a stoop, no doubt the consequence of sitting for 
thousands of hours at his computer as he wrote his book, making more 
than 100 million keystrokes and pushing his computer mouse further 
than 100 miles.

What, then, is his big new idea? He believes he has discovered that 
much of the universe can be understood in terms of simple programs - 
similar to, but far simpler than, those run by computers - rather 
than by means of traditional mathematical equations. "The 
Pythagoreans had this idea - all is number. This was a pretty good 
idea; it spawned mathematics," he says, sipping his favourite drink, 
a 50:50 mixture of pineapple juice and Seven Up. "My comparable idea 
is that all is computation. You can use computation as a unifying 
thread to study all kinds of questions about natural systems."

Sure enough, it is hard to find a single equation in the 846 pages of 
the main text of A New Kind of Science. The book is, however, teeming 
with beautiful images that illustrate the results of programs 
generated by rules so simple that a child could understand them. 
Nature, Wolfram says, uses simple programs like these in ways that 
have not been captured by traditional science.

   
Intense: Stephen Wolfram 
He maintains that nature uses such programs to generate the patterns 
on seashells and the shapes of leaves. The book features 
illustrations that look like ones we see in the natural world, such 
as the chervil garnish on my baked salmon. Although Wolfram does not 
claim to have accounted precisely for all of these patterns, he is 
confident that he has found their underlying mechanism and this will 
give others the keys to producing models of such natural systems that 
could not have been achieved before.

With consummate self-assurance, he asserts that his ideas form the 
basis of the first truly predictive theory of biology - one that 
enables us to foresee the shapes of natural bodies, rather than to 
have to settle for explaining them in retrospect. Equipped with these 
insights, technology will be able to think about building devices 
that can mimic biological systems as complex as the human eye. How's 
that for ambitious futurology?

Biologists argue that the complex patterns found in living things - 
their shape and their markings - are simply the result of evolution 
by natural selection. But Wolfram reckons that too much weight has 
been put on this idea, because "no one knows how such complicated 
stuff emerged out of evolution". His answer is that nature uses 
simple computer programs easily to produce complex patterns and 
shapes of organisms, and then may use natural selection to choose the 
ones that confer the ability to survive in their environments. "I've 
come to have some sympathy with creationists," he comments as he cuts 
up his steak. "Natural selection isn't everything, after all."

Wolfram also has things to say about space and time and, between sips 
of his drink, outlines his progress towards an ultimate theory of the 
universe. He believes that space is not continuous, as most of us 
perceive it to be, but is fundamentally a network of discrete but 
connected parts. Time, he suggests, emerges from an underlying 
process that makes it quite different from space. These ideas will, 
he assures me, lead to testable predictions when a more developed 
theory is ready.

To produce that theory, we shall have to rethink our fundamental 
theories such as Einstein's general theory of relativity, his theory 
of space, time and matter. Einstein developed this glorious theory 
over four years, following the usual path of keeping colleagues 
informed of his progress and then submitting his final paper in 1915 
for assessment by referees. Why hasn't Wolfram taken this route, 
accepted by scientists all over the world as part of their unwritten 
credo?


The problem was, Wolfram declaims, that his theory is more 
revolutionary than Einstein's. Although climactic work on general 
relativity was "a great achievement and a nice paper", the ideas 
fitted into an existing framework. Wolfram believes his work is so 
new that it is best to publish it in one book so that people can see 
it in the round, rather than being released in dribs and drabs. He 
learnt this, he said, after following the conventional academic 
process in the Eighties, when he published numerous articles in 
scientific journals. But he says that he quickly came to see that to 
take the huge steps away from orthodoxy that he thought were needed, 
he would have to embark on it by himself.

Wolfram points out that he consulted hundreds of leaders in science 
and technology in preparing A New Kind of Science and has worked 
continually with loyal assistants. Not having had to implement 
awkward comments from editors and referees before the paper could be 
accepted for publication, he alone has decided every detail of the 
book's contents. As I listen to Wolfram chatting, it occurs to me 
that he has been the project's ultra-controlling, hard-driving chief 
executive, just as he is at his successful company, which he seems to 
run as a benign dictator.

Is he nervous of the reception given to his work? Not a bit. "Look, 
I'm a practical man," he says and smiles. A book like this is bound 
to attract extreme views, he remarks equably - only time will tell 
what's right. "If other people don't get it, it's their problem, not 
mine."

Graham Farmelo, of the Science Museum, has edited It Must be 
Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science (Granta).

A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, £40) is 
available for £35, plus £1.99 p&p, from Telegraph Books Direct on 
0870 155 7222

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