"A New Kind of Science"

[encephalon]

This book isn't quite new anymore (a few years old), but here's a link to the entire text:

http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html

I'm wondering what people think of Wolfram's ideas. As a programmer, I find a lot of his ideas fascinating, and it's very difficult to just push aside the fact that computer programs have lately been able to do a lot that was once thought only the domain of nature and biological thought.

It's a pretty thick text, though, and a bit heavy on the theoretical side of things.. It might read like Das Kapital with pictures for some people, in any case.

Any comments or thoughts?

[ComradeRed]

I read this a not too long ago.

I was severely disappointed with it.

Although I don't mind accepting that programming is the "new geometry", to say it is THE new science is too far. Programming is more or less a synthesis of geometry and linguistics, math and humanities. That doesn't quite equate to science.

There is nothing empirical about it. As The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs argues, programming is almost an anti-empirical thing.

Now that doesn't mean programming is bad; far from it, for programming teaches excellent reasoning skills and how to make fun games. How is this useless? :lol:

Programming as a form of reasoning, OK; programming as the next superscience, no better than voodoo.

[Severian]

I read some stuff about this in Skeptic magazine; here's some of it. (http://www.hannotte.net/Skeptic.htm)

I'm not going to read the whole book, but according to this defense of it, (http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=271)

NKS seeks to introduce a basic, empirical science investigating the behavior of very simple programs. A very important part of the intellectual structure of NKS is how this relates to modeling nature--but although interesting in its own right and important for justifying the entire enterprise, this tie-in with the natural world is absolutely not the subject of the core science.

If that's true, it may be a new kind of math, but not a new kind of science. Science is, after all, the empirical investigation of the natural world.