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we have glimpsed before (with Rodney Brooks's business connections) and
which will reappear immediately below. And once more we are confronted
with the protean quality of cybernetics, with Kauffman's theoretical biology
morphing into the world of capital.
we Have succeeded in reducing all of ordinary pHysical beHavior to
a simple, correct tHeory of everytHing only to discover tHat it Has
revealed exactly notHing about many tHings of great importance.
R. b. lAughliN AND DAviD PiNes,
“tHe tHeory of everytHing” (2000, 28)
it's interesting wHat tHe principle of computational equivalence
ends up saying. it kind of encapsulates botH tHe great strengtH and
tHe great weakness of science. because on tHe one Hand it says tHat
all tHe wonders of tHe universe can be captured by simple rules.
yet it also says tHat tHere's ultimately no way to know tHe conse-
quences of tHese rules—except in effect just to watcH and see How
tHey unfold.
sTePheN WolFRAM,
“tHe generation of form
in
a nEw KinD of SciEncE
” (2005, 36)
If the significance of Kauffman's work lay in his discovery of simplicity within
complexity, Wolfram's achievement was to rediscover complexity within
simplicity. Born in London in 1959, Stephen Wolfram was a child prodigy, like
Wiener: Eton, Oxford, and a PhD from Caltech in 1979 at age twenty; he re-
ceived a MacArthur “genius” award two years later. Wolfram's early work was
in theoretical elementary-particle physics and cosmology, but two interests
that defined his subsequent career emerged in the early 1980s: in cellular au-
tomata, on which more below, and in the development of computer software
for doing mathematics. From 1983 to 1986 he held a permanent position at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; from 1986 to 1988 he was professor
of physics, mathematics and computer science at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, where he founded the Center for Complex Systems Re-
search (sixteen years after Ashby had left—“shockingly, I don't think anyone
at Illinois ever mentioned Ashby to me”; email to the author, 6 April 2007).
In 1987 he founded Wolfram Research, a private company that develops and
markets what has proved to be a highly successful product: Mathematica soft-
