A: A New Kind of Science is about a series of rather dramatic discoveries that I've made over the past 20 years. It started around 1981 when some computer experiments I was doing gave results that were utterly different from anything I had ever seen before. For a few years I tried to fit what I had found into the framework of existing mathematics and science. But eventually I realized that to understand what I had seen I would have to develop a whole new kind of science. And that's how I came to build A New Kind of Science. In the early 1980s I published some of the results from my early computer experiments, particularly ones on some systems called cellular automata. They created quite a stir, and over the last 15 years they have led to many books and thousands of scientific papers. But I was never satisfied, for I had always thought that what I had discovered was just the beginning of something much bigger. By the mid-1980s, however, I had decided that to make more progress I needed better tools. So I set about building Mathematica. And as I'd planned, Mathematica has ended up being a tool that is useful not only to me and my science but also to a few million other people doing technical work of all kinds. I spent about five years just building Mathematica and the company around it, but in 1991 I was able to go back to spending a large part of my time on basic science. I had thought that it would take only a couple of years to do what I wanted to do, but it turned out that I discovered vastly more than I had ever expected. I had never intended to tell the world so little about what I was doing for so long, but I have been building what turns out to be a very large and very novel intellectual structure, and I realized early on that the only feasible way to present it was in one coherent book. So after 10 and a half years of writing, that's what A New Kind of Science is. Q: What is the basic idea of A New Kind of Science? A: Almost all the science that's been done for the past three hundred or so years has been based in the end on the idea that things in our universe somehow follow rules that can be represented by traditional mathematical equations. The basic idea that underlies A New Kind of Science is that that's much too restrictive, and that in fact one should consider the vastly more general kinds of rules that can be embodied, for example, in computer programs. What started my work on A New Kind of Science are the discoveries I made about what simple computer programs can do. One might have thought that if a program was simple it should only do simple things. But amazingly enough, that isn't even close to correct. And in fact what I've discovered is that some of the very simplest imaginable computer programs can do things as complex as anything in our whole universe. It's this point that seems to be the secret that's used all over nature to produce the complex and intricate things we see. And understanding this point seems to be the key to a whole new way of thinking about a lot of very fundamental questions in science and elsewhere. And that's what I develop in A New Kind of Science. Q: Who should read A New Kind of Science? A: A New Kind of Science is about big new ideas and discoveries. So anyone who is interested in those kinds of things should find it interesting. It's very much a book about new things. And in the past century or so, most new things that relate to science have been described first in a rather technical way. But I've written A New Kind of Science to be completely accessible to a general audience. It's full of pictures (more than a thousand), and using these I've managed (with great effort, I might add) to explain pretty much the whole story of my new science in just plain ordinary language. (There are extensive notes at the back of the book that are somewhat more technical.) The results in A New Kind of Science have many big implications for existing sciences--physical, biological, mathematical, computational, and other. So people concerned with those sciences--both professionally and out of interest--should find A New Kind of Science important. Part of what I've done in A New Kind of Science is to develop a new basic way of thinking about scientific questions, and I think that'll be important not only for people who do science in practice but also for people interested in general theory and philosophy. A New Kind of Science is very fundamentally based on the idea of studying simple computer programs and what they do. I've made all sorts of discoveries that really change one's intuition about such things--which is important for anyone who spends time with computer programs. There are aspects of A New Kind of Science that'll be interesting to various other kinds of people. For example, it's full of facts and ideas relevant to recreational mathematics. (Programs for doing one's own experiments are in the notes at the back of the book, as well being available online.) It's also full of intricate computer-generated pictures of kinds that haven't been seen before, and that should be pretty interesting to people concerned with all sorts of types of design. I'm particularly hoping that a lot of people early in their careers will read A New Kind of Science and get involved with the ideas it describes.
A: There's going to be an increasingly large website about A New Kind of Science. But what's still important about a physical book is that it delimits its contents in a much more definite way than one can in a more fluid medium like the web. In A New Kind of Science I've written down in a complete and coherent way what I think people need to read to understand my ideas and discoveries. The web can give more details, and more interactivity. But it's hard to know if you've read everything on a big website. And a website can change every day. In A New Kind of Science I want to present what I've been thinking about for the past 20 years in a single definite package that it's possible for people to study in detail, and refer to unchanged for years to come. There's also a practical issue: the graphics for A New Kind of Science involve a huge amount of data--a total of about a gigabyte of PostScript. And it's not realistic for most people to download that over the web right now. But in a printed book one can handle that kind of data. We're actually using the latest printing technology (together with special paper) to be able to render images at very high resolution. And the results are quite spectacular. In fact, in lots and lots of cases they let one see what's going on in the systems I study much better than one could possibly manage on any present-day computer screen. Q: How does A New Kind of Science relate to Mathematica? A: Mathematica is what made A New Kind of Science possible. First, at a very practical level: it provided the tools I needed to make the discoveries that underlie A New Kind of Science. Second, at a more abstract level: it showed me that one could really start from scratch and build very big things from very simple elements. Of course, you don't need to know anything about Mathematica to understand A New Kind of Science--just like you don't need to know how computers work inside to use one. But for me, Mathematica was a crucial step in being able to create A New Kind of Science. Q: Will you distribute software for people to do their own experiments? A: A New Kind of Science is based on discoveries that I've made from studying extremely simple computer programs. Mostly the programs are so simple that--at least in Mathematica--they are just a line or two long. So I've actually been able to include the complete programs for a lot of my experiments in the notes at the back of A New Kind of Science. This website has computer-readable versions of these programs. And we have made a Mathematica application package, A NEW KIND OF SCIENCE Explorer, that is a complete collection of tools for doing experiments like the ones in A New Kind of Science. Q: What is the picture on the cover of A New Kind of Science? A: The yellow image is an example of one of the main discoveries of the book. It's an extremely simple computer program--something called the rule 110 cellular automaton--that turns out to produce behavior that seems as complicated as anything in our universe. The cover design was done by John Bonadies, who worked at our company for more than a decade, edited our Graphica books, and has been responsible for many of the graphic design awards Wolfram Research has won over the years.
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