Can all the universe’s unique creations be “computationally reduced” to computer code? World-renowned physicist Stephen Wolfram jammed Tech Auditorium to capacity with curious graduate students, faculty and silver-haired science afficionados eager to hear his response.
Wolfram, a winner of the MacArthur Genius Fellowship and noted innovator in the field of computation sciences, visited Northwestern on Tuesday to discuss his controversial and already influential work, “A New Kind Of Science.”
In his two-hour lecture, Wolfram used a series of elaborate visuals and a strong string of facts to support his belief that natural occurrences can be explained with simple code.
“One must wonder if one simple program, multiplied enough times, creates all of the wonderful complicated things in the universe,” Wolfram said.
Wolfram’s interest in computer sciences and the relation of simple computer programs to natural life inspired him to write “A New Kind of Science.” The 1,000-page volume of his research and philosophy explains how simple formulas can be used to describe and catalogue previously inexplicable natural processes.
“It took me 10 years to write it,” Wolfram joked. “I hope some of you have read it.”
Wolfram carefully and quickly went through his theory that every existing thing could be explained by relatively simple computation. He views computation as the common vein that could unify the study of life systems.
“This is what has led me to pursue a new intellectual structure, a new rule of science,” Wolfram said.
Wolfram used examples of mollusk shells to describe the specialization of complex traits in organisms. He explained that ornate natural appearances like the shell design are not part of an imperceptibly complex cellular optimization process. Rather, these occurrences can be easily explained by a cellular automaton model, a result of thousands of permutation of a universal code that starts out very simply but can evolve into something extremely complex.
Wolfram published his first scientific paper at age 15 and received his doctorate from the California Institute of Technology when he was 20. His early work revolved around high-energy physics, quantum field theory and cosmology.
Cosmology fascinated him from the beginning of his budding career.
“The idea of how structures emerged, how complicated shapes originated in nature,” were sources of inspiration, he said.
Wolfram then delved into computational irreducibility, which has become the fundamental foundation of current evolving sciences like artificial intelligence. He developed a randomness generation system that was essential in his forays into computational fluid dynamics. After academic stints at Princeton University and the University of Illinois, Wolfram in 1998 created Mathematica, a sophisticated software program for technical computing. The work Wolfram put into Mathematica led him to create new ideologies that he applied to his other interests in physics and biology.
During the lecture, Wolfram partly refuted the notion of evolution through natural selection, arguing that it does not completely account for the most complicated aspects of nature such as tree leafs or mollusk shells. Instead, he said, an elaboration of simple rules viewed in cellular automata could explain this natural phenomena.
“The confidence to see beyond conventional wisdom was a great, scary challenge,” Wolfram said.
Computer science graduate student Josh Unterman, 23, was skeptical of Wolfram’s ideas. “He does a good job with his modeling, but his models aren’t predictive,” Unterman said.
Wolfram said his science could possibly convert long-held academic notions of how science is studied.
“Some say paradigms change when people using the old methods die off,” Wolfram said with a quirky smile. “I, however, am more optimistic.”
