bandwidth parametric amplification. In the first
enclosure where they are vacuum-packed.
34 research
*
eu No. 63 | APRIL 2010
B
y day, 50-year-old Wolfram is the
head of a company called Wolfram
Research, which owns the well-
known calculation software
Mathematica and the new search engine
Wolfram Alpha. By night, he is a researcher,
a brilliant scientist with a reputation second to
none. Mathematician, computer scientist
and particle physicist, his research focuses on
cellular automata, mathematical models that,
according to Stephen Wolfram, explain how
the complexity of the world is constructed.
In his book A New Kind of Science published
in 2001, Wolfram challenges the very founda-
tions of science in all its fields. So, is he an
arrogant megalomaniac or a misunderstood
genius?
Prodigal son
Stephen Wolfram was born in London in
1959. At a very early age he showed signs of
remarkable intelligence. At the age of 13 he was
granted a study bursary for Eton College, a pres-
tigious secondary school where he rubbed
shoulders with the cream of the British elite.
One year later, Wolfram wrote an essay on par-
ticle physics. His first scientific article appeared
in Nuclear Physics in 1975, when he was only
15 years old. “At that time physics was one of
the most innovative fields of research. Many
advances were made, especially in particle
physics, which attracted me”, he explains (
1
).
The young genius pursued his career at
Oxford University (UK) before crossing the
Atlantic to work at the California Institute of
Technology – Caltech (US), where he gained
a doctorate in theoretical physics at the age of
20. It was here that he began to forge his rep-
utation. During this period he published more
than 25 scientific articles. He dreamed up
the Fox-Wolfram variables and discovered
the Politzer-Wolfram upper bound on the
mass of quarks. In 1981, at the ripe old age of
22, he became the youngest ever winner of
the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship, which
offers a bursary to the most talented researchers
each year.
Wolfram left Caltech in 1982 for the Institute
for Advanced Study at Princeton (US), an estab-
lishment devoted exclusively to scientific
research. It was here that cellular automata first
attracted his interest. His goal was to under-
stand the complexity of the world, a question
that no mathematical equation or physical
theory had ever succeeded in resolving.
The origin of the complexity of the Universe
is a subject that had fascinated him since child-
hood. “This question arose not only when
I was studying cosmology, but also neuro-
science and artificial intelligence. Although
I was working on the development of what
later became the Mathematica software
and creating primitive operations on which to
construct a whole series of more complex
operations, I had an intuition that there was
a similar general principle on which the full
complexity of nature was based, from the struc-
ture of the galaxies down to that of neurons.
For this reason I set out to test very simple
operations that could lead to the formation
of complex structures, which attracted me to
cellular automata.”
So what exactly is a cellular automaton? Take
a series of black and white cells. Then imagine
that a new row is generated according to
a series of rudimentary rules. For example,
a white cell can never be above another white
cell unless it forms a diagonal of 10 white cells.
The matrix resulting from this process randomly
produces structures that can be extremely
complex.
Businessman
During the 1980s Wolfram discovered Rule
30, a cellular automaton that can generate
forms similar to the patterns found on the shell
of a snail, Conus textile. This convinced him
that he had lifted a corner of the veil of the
universal code that he thought must exist.
This prompted him to publish a series of
articles on the topic and to create a new dis-
cipline, the science of complex systems. He
founded the Center for Complex Systems
Research at the University of Illinois (US),
helped to set up a think tank at the Santa Fe
Institute (US) and created the scientific review
Does the world function like a computer programme?
Are the forms and states of nature created from a basic
formula? Stephen Wolfram thinks so, and even claims
to have discovered the source code underpinning
the complexity of the universe.
The algorithm
of the gods
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