Stephen Wolfram is about to release A New Kind of Science, a book he's been writing for 10 years, that recasts science and the behaviour of the universe into cellular automaton; computational algorithms instead of formula. The story is told in The Man Who Cracked The Code To Everything.
(I have my own concerns about this book. I don't believe it's possible to crack the universe into discrete systems in some well encapsulated hierarchy. Abstration layers and emergence boundaries are abstractions as much as the other models we have. Just as we've found chaos at the edge of ordered behaviour, I've a feeling we'll find places where micro behaviour influences macro behaviour in some way that completely ignores our concepts of scales, maybe in the brain. And it won't be possible to model these behaviours, not in a system any smaller than the universe itself.)
Stephen Wolfram is about to release A New Kind of Science, a book he's been writing for 10 years, that recasts science and the behaviour of the universe into cellular automaton; computational algorithms instead of formula. The story is told in The Man Who Cracked The Code To Everything.
(I have my own concerns about this book. I don't believe it's possible to crack the universe into discrete systems in some well encapsulated hierarchy. Abstration layers and emergence boundaries are abstractions as much as the other models we have. Just as we've found chaos at the edge of ordered behaviour, I've a feeling we'll find places where micro behaviour influences macro behaviour in some way that completely ignores our concepts of scales, maybe in the brain. And it won't be possible to model these behaviours, not in a system any smaller than the universe itself.)