God's Algorithm: Discovery Of The Source Code Underpinning The Complexity Of The Universe.

Does the world function like a computer program? 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. Writer Julie Van Rossom explores the idea in an article on Wolfram’s ideas for Research EU.

By 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 foundations of science in all its fields. So, is he an arrogant megalomaniac or a misunderstood genius?

Wolfram left Caltech in 1982 for the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (US), an establishment devoted exclusively to scientific research. It was here that cellular automata first attracted his interest. His goal was to understand 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 childhood. “This question arose not only when I was studying cosmology, but also neuroscience 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 structure 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.

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Wolfram research: www.wolfram.com

Stephen Wolfram: www.stephenwolfram.com