Sam Wormley wrote:

Ref: http://www.sciencenews.org/20030816/bob10.asp
Science News - Week of Aug. 16, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 7

In Search of a Scientific Revolution
Controversial genius Stephen Wolfram
presses onward

Peter Weiss

Plenty of people claim to have theories that will revolutionize
science. What's rare is for other scientists to take one of these
schemes seriously. Yet that's what's happened since May 2002
when theoretical physicist Stephen Wolfram self-published a
book in which he alleged to have found a new way to address
the most difficult problems of science. Tellingly, he named this
treatise A New Kind of Science. The book, which Wolfram
sent to hundreds of journalists and influential scientists,
sparked a firestorm of criticism. Detractors charged that the
author was peddling speculations as discoveries, asserting that
decades-old research was new, and pirating the research of
others without giving due credit. Many commentators
concluded that the author's promise of a revolutionary
upheaval in science was grandiose and unbelievable, even as
they allowed that the book contained some incremental
scientific discoveries, as well as intriguing ideas.

Wolfram has only one real weakness in his thesis: There are no
practical examples with predictive power tendered. (Aesthetically, he
needs a good editor.)

Example: Wolfram devotes a page to Kuratowski's theorem (which
defines whether a graph can be laid flat without overlap) and then
proposes particles as knots in spacetime. Kuratowski's theorem is
remarkable stuff. The whole of organic chemistry systematic
nomenclature derives from flat graphs, and subtley much much more. If
one builds a molecule that has a non-flat graph (a right proper ****er
all by itself) like Uncle Al's [m.n]chiralanes,

1) A mathematician has to revise his graph theory software.
2) IUPAC can't assign systematic names by software or by hand.
3) NIST has to revise its C&EN-ballyhooed stereochemistry
assignment software.
4) A significant array of chemistry graphics programs freeze.
5) At least three research groups worldwide request structure
files, and discover their varied research interests have a class of
exceptions.

The chemical consequences of Kuratowski's theorem are thus
interesting. Wolfram doesn't go anywhere with Kuratowski's theorem.
No stated physics consequences. It could have been a very eloquent,
elegant, and exciting idea. After all... maximally simplified knots
as a class tend to be chiral.

It's a fault endemic to the whole 12 chapters/846 pages of his
exposition. Wolfram had maniacally beaten the thing to death as
analysis, then not bothered to even bitch slap a testable prediction.
Science is less about process than product. Given a known new
destination, any theoretician can jury rig a vehicle whether it is
epicycles or a heliocentric solar system. Then other folks come along
with tweaks like elliptic rather than circular orbits, and relativity.

I don't see Wolfram earning any respect for his exposition unless and
until it becomes predictive. We already have M-theory and economics
as morbidly obese undecidable lumps protected from criticism by
complexity. At least economics makes predictions, and those
predictions can be impressively good at small scale over short
intervals.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The Net!