Wolfram TED

It is worth going out and playing with Wolfram Alpha, it is pretty amazing and I would be completely unsurprised if it replaced Google for some classes of knowledge work.

I have "A New Kind of Science" -- I'm really not going to say that I understand it, but kind of like at the end of the video, I believe one has to take a "Super Programmers View of the Universe" ... it is all about software, "models".

Physics is a mathematical model that accurately predicts much of the physical universe, but it has to some degree broken down at the levels of the very small, the very hot and the very fast.

Wolfram believes that he has a better idea, Cellular Automata, as a better way than existing forms of mathematics to explain "virtually everything" ... the structure of the universe, language, thought, evolution ....

There are pieces that I think I kind of get ... sort of like reading the classics, Greek and Roman History, and a few thousand other things, I'm hopeful that I can reduce demands on my time in the future to undertake getting a bit smarter about this area.

(In my dreams, I may even take on and somehow come to grips with Roger Penrose: "The Emperors New Mind" ... sort of like "A New Kind of Science", I've taken a couple of runs at that one and decided, "I need a bigger brain, or A LOT more time" .... I have this sneaking suspicion that while "in theory", even a mortal ought to be able to figure some of this stuff out by taking longer, drawing on more supporting material, creating intermediate analogous models, etc, there is a fairly high risk this is "Non-computable in MooseSpace".

I think it IS fascinating to watch however!