How Everything Works

Coupled with the fact that conventional equations can describe only the simplest natural phenomena (you can write an equation for the orbit of a single planet around the sun, for example, but not for an entire solar system, let alone a living cell), the success of his simple programs made Wolfram suspect that science has been heading in the wrong direction for the past 300 years or so. Instead of trying to write complicated equations for everything, he says, scientists should have been searching instead for the cellular automata that correspond to what they are observing.

It's a bold claim, even for someone as brilliant as Wolfram. And for now, nobody can really say whether it's right or wrong. The fact that some of Wolfram's patterns resemble things in nature suggests that the world may really work as his programs do. And the more precise the resemblance, the more seriously scientists take it.

But the final verdict on whether Wolfram's New Kind of Science is truly revolutionary--or whether cellular automata merely resemble rather than describe the world--will have to wait until scientists can digest it fully. And that could take a while. "Each idea in the book," says Sejnowski, "will take at least 10 years to explore and test." Provocative as Wolfram's theories are, he says, it's whether they agree with nature that will be the ultimate test.