The Intriguing Mr. Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram is back in the news again. In 2002 he published "A New Kind of Science", which I did not read. I'm still not going to read it, but his ideas, as reported in the media, are intriguing, so I can't help recording my musings on the subject. No one will read what I write either, so that's fair. The idea of NKS is that fundamental physics can be explained by simple computational programs. That idea isn't particularly new. Wolfram is a former APL programmer, as am I, and in 1992 the French APLer Gerard Langlet presented a paper at an APL conference in St. Petersburg, Russia proposing a computational foundation for a "theory of everything" based on the not-equals process, which in APL is referred to "not-equals scan". An axiom of special relativity is that there is no universal clock. It does not make sense to speak of the time in one place as being the same, or different, from the time in another. If there were a universal cloc...