Stephen Wolfram: Programs Run The Universe

By Roland Piquepaille

Let's continue on a similar theme today with the intervention of Stephen Wolfram at the Comdex Fall 2002 trade show earlier this week.

Stephen Shankland reports from Las Vegas.

Stephen Wolfram believes the universe is composed not of particles and waves, but of simple tiny programs. He believes these myriad programs, or algorithms, give rise to physical phenomena as fundamental as space and as complicated as human beings.

Scientists accustomed to explaining the universe's workings through mathematical equations haven't always received Wolfram's ideas warmly. But the computer industry, whose inventions allowed Wolfram to develop his philosophy, could be an easier sell. Wolfram elevates the seemingly mechanistic computing tasks to the central role in the origin and functioning of the cosmos.

Not exactly a typical Comdex talk, isn't?

The speech, which delved into dizzying abstractions such as the curvature of space and the impossibility of simplifying some computing problems, was a departure from the usual Comdex fare. The trade show is devoted to the here and now of technology, but Wolfram encouraged his audience to look further into the future -- not just two or three years, but a century. His ideas and others will eventually be important, he believes.

Wolfram believes his small programs should get equal or better billing than mathematical equations as a way to explain and understand the world. Simple programs can give rise to phenomena with tremendous complexity, such as turbulence in water, whereas equations excel only in areas where effects can be simplified and end results easily predicted.

"One day, perhaps quite soon, we're really going to know the final fundamental rules of the universe," he predicted. "I think the rules will turn out to be quite simple. Determining how the universe is created from those rules turns out to be hard, hard work."

Is he right? His last book, "A New Kind of Science," has been criticized, specifically because his works were not reviewed by peer scientists.

Wolfram acknowledged that his computer-derived ideas are to an extent a product of his time, just as people began to believe that Mars had canals around the same time that canals were being built all over the world.

But that doesn't mean his ideas are wrong. Pioneering astronomer Galileo thought of the universe as working like a clock, an analogy that proved very useful in understanding the cosmos, he said.

Source: Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com, November 20, 2002