Our Buddy the UniverseSit, Universe, sit! Good Universe!by Ian Shoales When I was a kid, everything seemed about to be known. We'd put a man on the moon, beat the Commies, and issue jet packs and helpful robots to every registered voter by 1970, at the latest. Well, hippies, Vietnam, post modernism, political correctness, and modern physics intervened, leaving us more confused than ever. Undaunted, a man named Stephen Wolfram has dared to explain the universe itself in a 1,263-page book, A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media Inc., May 2002), a very surprising best seller: It sold 120,000 copies in two months. Waiting for the Cliff's NotesI haven't read it myself. I don't have the upper body strength to lift it much less understand it. But I did read the New York Times ("What's So New About New-Fangled Science?" June 16, 2002), which told me that Dr. Wolfram's thesis is that "the universe is really just a big computer." So what does that make angels? Tech support? Does Dr. Wolfram include their toll-free number? And if it is a computer, and it's Windows-based, sooner or later, we're going to have to reboot. Does Wolfram's book include a manual? In the San Francisco Chronicle, Dr. Wolfram was described as a "freelance physicist" and "computer tycoon" ("Cosmic Computer: A New Philosophy to Explain the Universe," July 1, 2002). I didn't know that physicists got a lot of contracting work — do they install drywall, too? — but clearly he's a smart guy. Anybody who can employ terms like "cellular automata" while pondering the nature of the universe is not a mental lightweight. And replacing mathematical equations with algorithms as a foundation for reality makes sense to this pooch. The notion that simple things rapidly become complex is hard to refute: A kiss becomes a bitter argument at 3 A.M. Flea markets become stock markets. Two cars become gridlock. A stupid premise becomes a stupid movie. A butterfly sneezes in China, and a Kansas girl gets transported to Oz. So what's the problem? Well, some have said that Dr. Wolfram didn't give sufficient thanks to others for the development of his ideas. Edward Friedkin, former head of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, told the Chronicle that Wolfram is "incompetent at giving people credit." (His theories can be found at digitalphilosophy.org, by the way.) On the other hand, if the universe is a computer, maybe Dr. Wolfram is just another glitch-ridden piece of software, like the rest of us. The Old New ScienceI seem to recall dimly from my college days that back in the Enlightenment, philosophers proposed a "clockwork" universe — the physics and mechanics of the physical realm were put in place by a watchmaker God who then absented himself from the shop and let things run their course. Long before that, we have the various creation myths — my personal favorite being the one that involved our planet resting on the back of a giant turtle as it swam slowly through an infinite night. It stands to reason that the paradigms of a moment become the momentary metaphors for the eternal. During the Enlightenment, people had intricate clockwork devices; today we have intricate bit-manipulating devices. A thousand years from now, somebody will posit that the universe is really a sentient gelatinous orb transforming matter on a subatomic level based on the whims of a reptilian alien from an alternate universe to whom we are just tokens in a role playing game. Of course, we have no way of knowing whether that's going to happen or not, but personally I'm sticking with turtle-based physics. Just to be on the safe side. Ian Shoales lives in San Francisco, which is only tenuously connected to the rest of the universe. He does not own a turtle.
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