Related link: http://www.wolframscience.com
Stephen Wolfram's long-awaited magnum opus, A New Kind of
Science, was published last month. As recent
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/11/arts/11WOLF.html">coverage
noted, "...his claims surpass the most extravagant speculation. He has, he argues, discovered underlying
principles that affect the development of everything from the human brain to the workings of the universe,
requiring a revolutionary rethinking of physics, mathematics, biology and other sciences."
A copy of the massive tome arrived on my doorstep last week when Amazon was at last able to fulfill a
pre-order I had placed over a year earlier. Needless to say, the content is indeed fascinating. In fact, in
the case of this extraordinary book, even the copyright notice provides cause for reflection. Consider for
yourself:
"Copyright © 2002 by Stephen Wolfram, LLC
...Discoveries and ideas introduced in this book, whether presented at length or not, and the legal rights and
goodwill associated with them, represent valuable property of Stephen Wolfram, LLC, and when they or work
based on them is described or presented, whether for scholarly purposes or otherwise, appropriate attribution
should be given.
...Illustrations (including tables) may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of the copyright
holder. Most individual illustrations in this book represent substantial original works in themselves, and
their reproduction is not a fair use... Permission to reproduce illustrations will normally be granted for
scholarly purposes so long as the illustrations are not modified...[and] are used and explained in an
appropriate way... Stephen Wolfram, LLC is the owner of the full copyright to all illustrations in this book
(except as indicated in the colophon), including...such original elements as non-obvious choices of rules and
initial conditions used to create them."
Will this relatively broad assertion of rights impede, enhance, or have no effect
on the rate and manner in which Wolfram's work is assessed and utilized (or not) by others? Would the history
of science and technological development have been different had the "discoveries and ideas introduced" in the
Principia been the property of Isaac Newton, LLC?
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Comments (1)
Read More Entries by Kelly Truelove.
To Wolfram's books!
Voluminous (owing to numerous pictures) and pretentious book "A New Kind of Science" contains many results which were received much more earlier by other authors in the Cellular Automata (CA) theory, in particular by the Soviet authors (see the site http://www.geocities.com/intl_academy_noosphere/). Furthermore, the fundamental results in this field pertain to other authors. The unhealthy vanity of the author of the book does not allow him to look objectively on history of the CA theory in which he is far from being leading expert.