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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see some great blog posts, talks, etc from people who disagree with this piece of research.

There are lots of people who dislike him, great, I agree, this is common knowledge, but it's not a reason that his research is wrong – the scientific community is better than ad-hominem attacks.

The problem is that he's a pretty good science communicator. As a layperson (but software engineer so I'm somewhat mathematically literate and know what a graph is), I got through the intro talk published by them and came out feeling like I understood what the premise was, roughly how it worked, how it could apply, why it might be a good model.

I then read a physicists "debunking", but because it was basically just references to physics papers saying "ah but you didn't address the something conjecture" I didn't really get anywhere with it.

I'm glad the physics community are discussing it internally, that is ultimately more important, but as a layperson I'd really like to get a good understanding of the other side of the argument.

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Wolfram's framework is unfalsifiable and contains no new explanatory power. That alone should be sufficient to show you why folks are so skeptical of the claims. Combined with the fact that he introduces new terminology and refuses peer review, this should give you reason to expect that there is a simpler, more canonical, already-explored branch of theoretical physics which covers the same stuff.

I wish that you had linked to the material that you didn't "get anywhere with"; without it, it's hard to actually examine the quality of the underlying arguments. I found writeups like [0] which seem extremely well-argued; the formal ideas come from [1], and the core idea is Bell's theorem [2]: there is some essential non-locality to QM, we can experimentally see it, and so we can't just say "oh, it's all a big computer", even if it's a computer with interestingly high dimensionality or interconnections, without further justification.

[0] https://www.singlelunch.com/2020/04/23/why-stephen-wolframs-...

[1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

When you say it's unfalsifiable and contains no new explanatory power, it would be great to dig into this.

My understanding is that they are early on in the research so the lack of explanatory power feels... uninteresting at this stage? They have started to make predictions (such as the existence of lighter weight particles than electrons that still have mass), but in general it just feels like they're still too early to conclude that it's not falsifiable and has no explanatory power?

Well, it's fine that they are in the early stages, but Wolfram went ahead with a press bonanza to announce that he had solved physics without the corresponding predictions that would demonstrate it.

That's why it's important to point out that it's not falsifiable and has no explanatory power at the moment. What he's doing is bad for science and does real harm, eroding the public understanding of how science actually works in favor of flashy headlines.

> Wolfram went ahead with a press bonanza to announce that he had solved physics

If you read/listen/watch the announcements (which I'll agree are a bit over the top), the position is very clear that they have "found" a new avenue of research that they believe has the possibility to bear fruit. They are clear that it _could_ form the basis for a "theory of everything", once much more research has been done.

They are optimistic in how they talk about it, and many may disagree with that, but they are not claiming they have "solved physics".

I am unfamiliar with Wolfram's new theory, but some have said it is similar to his previous "Theory of Everything" via cellular automaton.

It often can be quick to determine whether a theory will ever be falsifiable - it has to do with the nature of the claims being made by the theory.

> such as the existence of lighter weight particles than electrons that still have mass

That's not a prediction, as we know that neutrinos exist.

Apologies, I may have meant neutrinos.

Let's compare quickly to a Brand X. I'll choose string theory. Concrete forms of string theory have been proposed, and they predict surprising things that folks could not have easily predicted; in particular, supersymmetry and multiple compactified dimensions are concrete predictions that could be tested with particle accelerators, and we have tested (and rejected!) some supersymmetries this way.

String theory also predicts some things that are congruent with existing theories but, by dint of building them differently, gives different predictions for how they work. In this, we get new explanatory power. For example, string theory predicts fuzzball black holes, giving a resolution to the firewall problem. All string theories have tachyons, which is surprising but would not be the first time that they've shown up theoretically, and they solve some questions about spacetime (while opening many others!) Some string theories have photons and gravitons, which can unify our existing conflicts between GR and QM.

And, crucially, string theory admits narrowing of conjectures and explanatory regimes. It's easy to take a string theory, combine it with an observation from a satellite or a particle accelerator, and conclude that no, the theory was wrong. Horribly wrong, completely wrong, totally wrong. String theory is actually sufficiently formal that the current source of realizing wrongness is from "swampland" critiques, which are merely observations that a working string theory ought to pass some basic arithmetic sanity checks.

Sure, maybe my conclusions are premature. As a cousin comment notes, though, a particle theory that doesn't immediately spit out the Standard Model is a little suspect, and one that admits basically any model of particle physics is also a little suspect.

> but in general it just feels like they're still too early to conclude that it's not falsifiable and has no explanatory power?

In other words, it's not science yet.

One issue with fundamental theories that I've seen is that it's really easy to come up with a model that reproduces some aspects of relativity or even quantum mechanics, especially in some approximation, such as low energies or weak fields. In that regime, you can wave your hand and pretend that everything is linear or nearly so. The symmetries are common symmetries that a lot of algebras or geometries share, so things just "seem to work" almost magically.

This is like saying you've invented a car from scratch because you've made something with mirror symmetry that can roll forward. Obviously, this is missing more than a few details.

What Stephen Wolfram seems to have done is come up with an extremely generic system that can describe anything, in much the same way that a CAD program can use meshes to describe any piece of machinery you'd like to design. That doesn't mean that meshes are equivalent to metal and concrete. Just because meshes can have various symmetries and can be used to represent circular things doesn't mean that a mesh is a car either.

Similarly, in a very real sense the Universe performs computation, because -- duh -- it contains computers. And brains. And many things of that nature. Brains and computers run by the same rules of physics that stars and experimental particle beams do. Hence, the Universe computes. It also computes in the trivial sense that if you add 1 hydrogen atom to 1 hydrogen atom you get 2 hydrogen atoms.

So if you come up with a very generic form of computation, such as automata, or substitution rules, or whatever, of course you're going to find many things that "look like" various aspects of the computation the Universe is performing. But analogies are just that: comparisons of vaguely similar features. That doesn't mean they're isomorphic to each other, nor does it mean that some random theory is actually the rules the Universe follows.

Stephen spends a lot of his time jumping up and down and pointing at some trivial aspect of his theories and saying "Look at this! My theory can perform addition! The Universe does addition too! Hence my theory is the theory of the Universe!"

I've been interested in the fundamental theory of everything for two decades now, and I spend about an hour a day on average poking through random arXiv papers looking for ideas or signs of progress.

I've noticed a few things: Much of Wolfram's criticism of academia and modern theoretical physics is correct. It's much the same as Eric Weinstein's criticism. They both say that the politics and economics of academia make it nigh impossible to rock the boat and come up with radical new ideas. I noticed this too. Modern theoretical physics isn't. It's intellectual wankery and dick measuring as a way of getting pieces of paper and tenure. There's zero motivation or incentive to do anything useful, because the system has slowly evolved over time to disincentivize it.

However, this doesn't mean that their particular "rebel" flavour of TOE is correct, just because the models produced by Universities have gone nowhere. Progress in some arbitrary direction is not necessarily better than no progress at all! Progress in the right direction is needed.

Over the years (decades!) I've developed an acid test to quickly sort the wheat from the chaff:

1) Does the theory even mention particle generations? Bonus points if demonstrates at least three and explains why we haven't found four.

2) Is it a truly local theory in that global communication is never required? (Many current theories implicitly involve "solving" something, which is often implicitly a global minimisation.)

3) Can the theory be applied to single systems, or just ensembles? (Most QM theories automatically fail this one. Single particles exist, single electrons go into higher orbits from a single photon, etc... Either you can model this, or your theory is woefully incomplete)

4) Can it explain the observations of Quantum Mechanics without resorting to the "infinite dimensional" mathematical wizardry? Can it produce computable models, or just symbolic gibberish that I guarantee you no particle "computes" as it goes about its business.

5) Nobel prize winning stuff would explain the origins of constants that are currently experimentally determined inputs. (Most theories I've seen don't even have numbers.)

6) The ultimate requirement is for a TOE to "not only" produce the known observable physical behaviour but to also naturally exclude everything else. That is, the ideal rules should have some sort of incredibly tight self-consistency that can only happen in one way and can only produce physics. For example, an algebra that can only be used to represent valid combinations of particles and fields, and can never represent any other "invalid state" that makes no sense.

Unfortunately, 99% of the stuff I see fail at all of the above. Wolfram's theory does too. His current graph-based theory and his previous cellular automaton theory spectacularly fail the 6-th requirement. They're both nearly unconstrained computation models with infinite flexibility, the exact opposite of a good TOE.

From my understanding of where the research is at, I think you're asking too much of it, and rebutting it on that basis. My understanding is that it is being posited as a category of models, of which one could be the "theory of everything". They haven't said that one of them is, and they know they haven't found the one that is yet if there is one.

I'm interested in discussions about why this type of model can't work, rather than people repeatedly pointing out that they haven't found the exact model yet, which seems to be a strawman argument.

As for your 6 acid test elements, that's exactly the sort of thing I'd like to learn more about, but in the current wording I feel like I'm missing about a Phd's worth of understanding. I think communicating this in a more accessible form would be great!

I understand that theoretical physicists have reasons why they don't like his theories, but I don't understand what those reasons are, whereas I do understand a bit about the theories. This makes it hard (as much as I want to) to be persuaded by physicists.

To be a bit more concrete, this is a bit like saying "Computers could be used to simulate/represent physical theories, hence studying computers could lead to a theory of everything."

That's not even wrong! Studying computation, computation systems, or even just mathematics in general almost certainly could assist with progress towards a TOE.

That doesn't mean that pointing at a computer running a few dozen lines of code[1] and saying "A TOE could be in there... somewhere" is materially useful.

[1] I'm paraphrasing Stephen himself here!

Personally, I feel that if Stephen really wanted forward progress towards a TOE, he's uniquely positioned to do so. He controls a company that makes one of the best Computer Algebra Systems. He's in a position of power over a large, highly talented staff of mathematicians, and he could push Mathematica's features towards multiple relatively unexplored areas of computational mathematics where there isn't much available at the moment.

Unfortunately, he's made the decision that the only two such areas worthy of his time and his company's resources are cellular automata and graph rewriting.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, he could have done added all sorts of features for things like handling Einstein summation convention, tensors, Geometric Algebra (and noncommutative algebras in general), topology, etc...

Those would at least have immediate utility to working physicists, and if pushed to the extreme could maybe help uncover some fundamental theory somewhere.

But nope. He likes to play with graphs, like a kid with with a Spirograph only interested in making pretty patterns.

> Einstein summation convention, tensors, Geometric Algebra (and noncommutative algebras in general), topology, etc...

Are python libraries taking up this challenge?

Have you considered researching the subject matter yourself?

The parent articulated that this is psuedoscience, preached by a man who has advocated self-serving psuedoscience before.

I have, in fact that's really why I'm here commenting about this. I find I learn best when good science communicators explain a topic at or just beyond my level, with the help to raise my understand, rather than when poor communicators point to a bunch of papers targeted at theoretical physicists and say "go read the background". I suspect I'm not alone on this.

Again, as I've said in other comments, just pointing at him and saying he's a fraud isn't useful in explaining why. I think the scientific discourse deserves better than that.

"Just asking questions" and then rejecting a community's answers seems like a fruitless strategy for learning.

It is also uncomfortably close to the tactics of creationists, antivaxxers, and other conspiracy theorists.

I don't think I am rejecting the community's answer, I'm encouraging the community to be better at communicating their answer, rather than brushing off questions from lay-people with impenetrable answers. I'm very keen to have things explained at my level, because I get the "crackpot" feeling from Wolfram, I just don't know enough to understand why he's wrong.

I've done science communication myself, I helped run a science festival, I know many people who still do it and are very good at it. I know how important it is to communicate well and how much impact it can have! I've even seen good science communication turn creationists and antivaxxers.

I must admit I had seen the parallels while writing these things, but I've also seen people who unfortunately do believe these things turned away from mainstream science because they aren't yet at a level of understanding that the community mandates they operate at.

Unfortunately for the mainstream scientific community there's often a disdain for communication like this. The fact that Wolfram is relatively good at it makes the whole situation more difficult.

We have this concept in software engineering of accidental vs. essential complexity. I feel like what you're asking for is an explanation from physicists that strips out all the accidental complexity, such that the essential is left in a comprehensible form. But it seems totally plausible to me that there is no such essential core small enough to be comprehensible to us without "a phd's worth of understanding". At some point simplifying analogies are not enough, because the critical differences between theories that determine whether they are the right or wrong direction are too deep within the subtleties to show up in analogy.

If I can add a layman perspective to Jiggawatts excellent analysis - since there's a very similar issue happening in economics, it may be a bit more approachable.

Economics is also full of theories that try to explain the entire complex system from partial observations, and people arguing furiously with each other, in what for a large part in academia is a contrived nonsense that is practically useless for real world issues, and mainly serves signalling purposes.

How this manifests itself there, is that they will take some time series of some kind of data - price of oil over a few years say - fit the equation of a straight line to it - and the less responsible ones then yell "solved". But if you took a longer portion of that data, went back several decades say, you would see that it is bouncing up and down like a yo-yo, and actually the only equation that is pretty much guaranteed not to fit it, is a straight line. Unless you take a short enough period. Or to put it another way, with a short enough ruler you can fit any curve.

Wolfram, and his opponents, are essentially doing the same thing, only with multi-dimensional math, where the curve in question looks a bit more complex than a straight line, but fundamentally its the same thing. Which is why it matters much more than outsiders may appreciate that the model isn't an exact fit.

Lurking behind all of this of course, is that one time in physics when the data and the theory were (within the limits of then technology) a pretty exact fit, and still the theory was completely wrong - epicycles.

Sounds like over fitting in machine learning.

> They haven't said that one of them is, and they know they haven't found the one that is yet if there is one.

In other words...they haven't made any significant discovery, yet.

The physicists are just saying "OK, get back to us when you have something concrete we can evaluate."

Everything you say is correct. Your acid test is great. And yet, we agree that the machine is stuck.

'Does your startup implement every single feature of Windows / Excel / Postgres / AWS and then some? No? Well, then go back to work and come back when you have something truly innovative.'

There is no charity. 'What you did is fairly incomplete, but the ground you covered so far is promising. Here's a list of challenges. Where would you start addressing them?' Maybe the answer will come 10 years down the road, in some University unaffiliated with the original author. In the current system, there is zero investigation of anything else but well trodden orthodoxy.

The computer science equivalent of the "type of progress" I would like to see is ZFS.

When ZFS was announced, it blew my mind. The Sun ZFS team showed that traditional RAID had a veritable laundry list of fatal, nigh unfixable flaws. Various forms of silent data corruption caused by things such as reordered writes, partial writes, lost writes, or bit flips, and the like.

Then they showed how Merkle Trees provide a simple, unified, provably correct mathematical model of data integrity that in one fell swoop permanently eliminates all of the issues with traditional RAID data integrity. Poof. Gone! Reordered writes: detected. Lost writes: detected. Bit flips: detected. ZFS could even protect against malware in the drive firmware. RAID has no hope.

They demonstrated that in their testing, they had uncovered bugs in several commercial RAID adapter cards and even the DMA chip of one particular motherboard. These were real problems that really were eating people's data!

Did they have online ZFS pool expand on day 1? No. Defrag? No. Encryption? Nope. In fact, it took over a decade to add all of the various features and niceties that people wanted.

That doesn't matter though, because on Day 1 they demonstrated a fundamentally better way of storing data.

Stephen Wolfram hasn't really done this. To put things in the above terms, he hasn't managed to even store a file and retrieve it intact yet, and there's no firm indication that this will ever be possible. This makes his system indistinguishable from /dev/null.

Worse, his system may be the type where you can put files in, but when you try to read them back out, the filesystem simply contains an infinite list of files, one for all possible bit strings. I mean sure, technically your file is in there... somewhere. But this is indistinguishable from /dev/random. Also not useful.

Stephen's work is intriguing. He wants a model to simulate space, time, matter and energy. Some desirable properties of such a system, from a layman perspective:

1. The model must be fundamentally simple.

2. The model must be able to produce 'interesting' behaviors somehow.

3. The model must exhibit very puzzling behaviors like 'speed of light is a constant', 'space dilation' or 'quantum superposition'.

He observes that extremely simple rewrite systems, like the infamous rule 30, satisfy 1 and 2, under a provable universality result: all 'interesting' behaviors are Turing equivalent. He then observes that the succession of states of the system could be observed as 'time', that having the fundamental simulation substrate create new nodes on the fly could be observed as 'space dilation', that the speed of generating new nodes is a limiting factor in the same way the speed of light is and that having alternate rules applicable in a given configurations could be observed as 'superposition'. This sounds promising. Let's work out the details. To my layman understanding, it's a fundamentally different approach than what physicists have been doing, extremely successfully, in the past 100+ years.

So far, he's empty handed, and very far from concrete results. He's pioneering the exploration of this space by building the first generation of programming languages, the machine code. Maybe 50 later, someone will build ZFS / explain the '3 but not 4 particle generations', using ML to express their thought process.

He's put some thought in attempting to bridge graph rewrite systems to the Universe's behavior. No measurable results, but no [layman's] obvious way to refute either. https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/potent...

He really isn't pioneering much though. He talks about graph automata like he invented them, or that he was the first to see that simple rules could generate very complex behavior.

But he wasn't.

I am not saying he hasn't done anything interesting, but it is actually hard to tell exactly where any original work begins, even for someone somewhat familiar with the area of computing related to graph transforms (me), because in his writing he implies he did so much more than he did. So it isn't clear where his contribution line starts.

It rubs me so wrong I can't read anything he writes anymore.

This may be one aspect of the negative reaction of some physicists too.

That is a fair criticism. The tone is off-putting. Partly because of the tone, I considered NKS a load of pointless drivel for 20 years. Yes, absolutely, he didn't invented graph automata. But he's the one willing to propose graph automata as a model of the Universe, and work out some technical details. Or, at least, he's building tooling to experiment with graph automata in this context such that someone else can work out technical details. Or fail to do so. Or fail to do so and prove this is a dead end.

While I'm not familiar with what kind of graph transforms work is done these days, I would have hoped that if someone re-created some version of Lorenz transforms on top of graph transforms, I would have heard of it. The discussion would be more constructive, or destructive as a manner of speaking, if someone would point out that either Stephen is wrong, or old news, on the handful of technical points he is making.

https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/potent...

I have a good answer to you. It is not unlikely the universe is made out of Interaction Combinators. That's purely because those are arguably the most elegant model of computation. Of course, elegance is on the eye of the beholder and it is hard to express why I believe that, but I do, so feel free to have a look and judge yourself. Even if I'm right, though, how useful is that? Not at all, I guess. As you said, anything equivalent to a Turing machine could be running the universe, so even if we figured out the specific model "used" by reality, this wouldn't be that useful.

"he's a pretty good science communicator"

I'm a physics postdoc and can't understand what he writes. How good of a communicator can he possibly be?

To be more accurate perhaps:

He's pretty good at sounding like a good science communicator. For someone without a Phd in physics, this is unfortunately indistinguishable from actually being a good science communicator.

In other words, he is good at impressing people who don't understand the topic; but the people who understand the topic remain completely unimpressed.

The first part without the second one could mean "great communicator". The first part with the second one sounds more like "crackpot".

It is easy to impress people when you have studied something longer than them. There are interesting ideas that are relatively simple to learn, so if you learn them and then explain them simply to other people, they are amazed.

But it is possible to get some beginners' stuff right, and then get some advanced stuff wrong. And the laypeople who listen to you are impressed by the former, and cannot notice the flaws in the latter. Then you claim to have found answers to some expert-level questions, and your fans go like "this is pure genius, why doesn't academia build statues in his honor?"

From my perspective, the part that impresses people is Wolfram pointing at a Turing-complete system (it used to be cellular automata, recently it is some graph transformations) and explaining what Turing-complete means. Which is fantastic if you never heard about Turing-complete systems before! Yes, in theory it could be used to simulate a universe, despite being such a simple thing. If this is news for you, it will completely blow your mind!

On the other hand, if you studied computer science, you know that Turing-complete systems are a dime a dozen. For example, almost any programming language is Turing-complete. Yes, it is fascinating to find things that are way simpler than the usual programming language, and are still Turing-complete. But again, if you studied computer science, you already heard about a few of them, so learning that there is yet another one doesn't sound so revolutionary. At best, you may admire its elegance, but it's still only one specimen amongst many.

So when Wolfram continues to explain how his currently favorite system could simulate the universe, you start yawning, because "being able in principle to simulate the universe as we know it" is a general property of Turing-complete systems. Yes, it is a property of Wolfram's current favorite system, but it is also a property of zillion other Turing-complete systems. There is no reason to single out this one specifically. You might as well talk about how the universe could in theory be simulated in PHP. Yes, it could, but without further evidence there is no reason to assume it really is.

(In fact, it's even worse. If something is Turing-complete, not only it could simulate our universe, but also any other universe with completely different laws of physics. Therefore, despite the fact that our universe could be simulated in PHP, you can't really hope to discover anything relevant about our universe by studying PHP. A universe without gravity, or a universe where gravity is a repulsive force, could be simulated in PHP, too. This is why you cannot find useful information about gravity by studying what can be done in PHP.)

...so far, this was inside my field of expertise, which is computer science; now I am going to step outside of it and comment on physics...

If I understand it correctly (and reading comments by people who know physics better than me suggest that I am roughly on the right track), the next step is Wolfram finding some vague analogies between some properties of his currently favorite Turing-complete systems, and the laws of physics as we know them. Like, if something grows, that is kinda like the expansion of universe; but if something shrinks, that is kinda like the relativistic contraction; and if two things are somehow connected to each other, that is kinda like the quantum entanglement. Maybe the actual analogies found by Wolfram are less lame than this, but ultimately they are just analogies, and probably sound equally lame to an expert in physics. Things kinda grow, but not in a way that would allow you to actually derive the equation for Lorentz contraction. They just grow, and that's it. If we wouldn't have the theory of relativity by now, you couldn't use this to invent it. It has no predictive power. First you must know the laws of physics, and only then you can search for something that is vaguely analogical to them.

And it is this combined effect of "finding a simple system that is Turing-complete" and "finding some analogies between the system and the laws of physics" that creates the strong impression in laymen that Wolfram found something relevant to understanding our universe. "Hey, if it can be used to simulate the universe, and if we can find analogies with some laws of physics, why don't we just study it further and maybe we will find some new, hitherto unknown, laws of physics? Why is the academia not paying more attention?" The main problem is that the fact that it could simulate the universe actually means much less than how it sounds, and the analogies can only be found when you know what you are looking for, in other words only after the relevant laws of physics have been already discovered.

EDIT:

Looking at this discussion, you can find people who defend Wolfram because he sounds exciting, or because it feels unfair that his theories do not get the attention they supposedly deserve. Not a single person is defending him because he explained some law of physics correctly. And this is not an accident. As far as I know, the same thing happens outside Hacker News, too.

It's unrealistic and unfair to expect scientists/experts to do the hard work of debunking every crackpot that comes along. The crackpot needs to be more apparent and enticing if he wants to break through.

Yeah I don't expect them to debunk every crackpot, but a large project with multiple people involved, the backing of a large company, and several papers submitted for peer review feels to me like it passes the bar of "worth engaging with".

Maybe, but his track record is not great. If he's really got something, I'd think he could easily draw people into it rather than create skepticism. But I don't know much...

He published a paper, asked for comments, and here we are saying he is a crackpot and should somehow 'draw people into it'. Seems like everyone is losing...

Well, I'll bet anyone $100 he doesn't have a theory everything.

If it gets through peer-review of reputable journals - then certainly yes. The burden of proof always rests on the one proposing a grand claim.

But my bet*) is that if it gets accepted, then with severely reduced claims (not "theory of everything", but "We model X with Y, and were able to replicate Z1 in general and Z2 in low-energy limit. Further studies...").

Large company and many people involved, as of now, is the only reason why it gets some attention. Otherwise it would be buried as a PDF in "misc" section on one's academic website.

Does Wolfram's model correctly generate the many worlds of quantum mechanics? I get the impression that it doesn't, and I've seen it claimed that this has been mathematically demonstrated, but I can't say for sure.

That includes variability in some things that are constant in our region of the universe. It's fine for everyday purposes for us to regard things like the ratio of masses of the particles or strengths of the forces as fundamental and given, but a truly fundamental theory needs to generate the entire landscape, possibly including variation in the number of extended dimensions of space.

At the same time, there is a sense in which it's easy to do that: just use a universal Turing machine. A correct fundamental theory should generate something akin to the landscape of string theory, but at the same time not generate e.g. Conway's Game of Life. Is Wolfram's theory being evaluated on achieving that delicate balance between generating too little and too much?

>The problem is that he's a pretty good science communicator.

Disagree. I bought one of his books, Idea Makers, knowing that he is a bit a jerk/kooky, because it looked interesting. Every chapter about a different important scientist/thinker in history, what could go wrong? What went wrong was that actually every chapter was about Wolfram and/or Mathematica. He can't help himself!

But, all that said, that doesn't mean he is wrong!

I've been to one of his talks, where the topic wasn't about him or Mathematica or "Wolfram Language". He talked a lot about himself and Wolfram Language.

Seems like a pretty smart guy, though, and has built up a pretty impressive empire.

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