Re: Wolfram also has been criticized because his book was self-published without using the formal peer-review process in which colleagues formally screen scientific works. The process is designed to catch errors and weed out bad ideas.
Wolfram's whiz-kid bio:
Stephen Wolfram is a well-known scientist and the creator of Mathematica. He is widely regarded as one of the world's most original scientists, as well as an important innovator in computing and software technology.
Born in London in 1959, Wolfram was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech. He published his first scientific paper at the age of 15, and had received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20. Wolfram's early scientific work was mainly in high-energy physics, quantum field theory, and cosmology, and included several now-classic results. Having started to use computers in 1973, Wolfram rapidly became a leader in the emerging field of scientific computing, and in 1979 he began the construction of SMP--the first modern computer algebra system--which he released commercially in 1981.
In recognition of his early work in physics and computing, Wolfram became in 1981 the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship. Late in 1981 Wolfram then set out on an ambitious new direction in science aimed at understanding the origins of complexity in nature. Wolfram's first key idea was to use computer experiments to study the behavior of simple computer programs known as cellular automata. And starting in 1982 this allowed him to make a series of startling discoveries about the origins of complexity. The papers Wolfram published quickly had a major impact, and laid the groundwork for the emerging field that Wolfram called "complex systems research."
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stephenwolfram.com
Get the picture?? Wolfram's career started off with a bang at the precocious age of 15... but now, the guy's past 40 and he has yet to land some prestigious achievement/price (like the Nobel or something) to match (justify?) his exceptional credentials... Hence Dr Wolfram is in a hurry to make it before his window of celebrity closes down... Cellular automata? Sure, that sounds sexy... I guess as sexy as a clockwork was to XVIth-century scholars --or a computer was to mathematicians in the 1960s. It's a known pattern that, throughout history, researchers have routinely compared the (known) universe with the most complex machine of their time... Accordingly, neurologists should be the next trendsetters in sorting out the universe as some super-brain with billions of interacting neurones...
As for Dr Wolfram, I'm afraid that, despite his last-ditch endeavor to be the new Einstein, he'll end up as yet another has-been...
Gus |
