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The science of Stephen Wolfram forum.

Article Excerpt
Connecting Theory and Data Wolfram, Naiditch, and the Nature of Science David Naiditch's article "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Universe" (Vol. 10, No. 2) does a great job explaining how Stephen Wolfram's ideas are not unprecedented and how idiosyncratic Wolfram's education and isolation are. Wolfram comes across at first like another Nikola Tesla whose brilliance was harnessed more to make money, and, as the quote from Jordan Ellenberg states, he is "selling not just a theory, but a story--the story of a genius who retreats from the misunderstandings and jealousy of smaller minds."

Yet Naiditch's commentary on how science works and what science is and what scientists do detracts from the strength of his article. This detraction is especially noticeable when he ventures into the world of the life sciences, evolution, and biology, where the implications of Wolfram's unoriginal claims are the most compelling.

Naiditch asks "Where are nature's black and white squares?" and states "Wolfram ... fails to translate his ceils and rules to features of the real world." Naiditch quotes Feynman that "in physics you have to have an understanding of the connection of words with the real world ... Only in that way can you find out whether the consequences are true." Naiditch states that "Science is an empirical endeavor," a statement that conflicts with the history of science at least from Galileo to Einstein, since science, even as practiced by Feynman, involved mathematization, revision, simplification, hypothesization, and extrapolation, none of which am essentially empirical. But the point is well taken. Our theories and hypotheses should have some ontological anchor and import, otherwise they am neither testable nor relevant to anything.

It is surprising then that Naiditch should hold up as weaknesses Wolfram's failures to specify what simple computational laws might be behind the appearance of life on earth and its evolution, and hold up the biological scientists as authoritative in this regard. Evolutionary theory when formulated in the nineteenth century was not empirical, though based upon a bit of fieldwork coupled with years of speculation and formulation. When cellular biologists fast attempted to bring mathematics to their work their choice of equations was the 'free floating' thermodynamics of Walter Nernst's 1888 equation defining entropic pressure. The use of this equation by Julius Bernstein in 1902 was an attempt to account for the then-hypothesized cell membrane voltage in terms of ion concentration gradients. In other words the equation was invoked to explain in molecular and atomic terms electromagnetism and electrochemistry. When the role of the electron in electricity and chemistry was later understood by the physicists prior to the 1930s, the biologists then and still today did not see any relevance for...