A New Kind of Science – Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram, a child prodigy and creator of the very successful Mathematica software application, locked himself away for several years and produced a 1000 page plus, mammoth tome – A New Kind of Science. He shunned peer review, suppressed findings from people working for him and duplicated much of the work of others either by accident or, as some have suggested, as the result of direct plagiarism. Nevertheless, there is something in what Wolfram says when he talks about a new kind of science, based upon cellular automata and emergent iterative systems, the unpredictable iteration of equations rather than equations themselves. This is an idea that is brewing in a different form in the work of others such as Stuart Kauffman and Lee Smolin.
Running time: 1 hour 27 mins.