From the Foundations Laid by A New Kind of Science

When A New Kind of Science was published twenty years ago I thought what it had to say was important. But what’s become increasingly clear—particularly in the last few years—is that it’s actually even much more important than I ever imagined. My original goal in A New Kind of Science was to take a step beyond the mathematical paradigm that had defined the state of the art in science for three centuries—and to introduce a new paradigm based on computation and on the exploration of the computational universe of possible programs. And already in A New Kind of Science one can see that there’s immense richness to what can be done with this new paradigm. Continue reading

I Think I Should Write a Quick Book…

In the end it’s about five and a half pounds of paper, 1280 pages, 973 illustrations and 583,313 words. And its creation took more than a decade of my life. Almost every day of my thirties, and a little beyond, I tenaciously worked on it. Figuring out more and more science. Developing new kinds of computational diagrams. Crafting an exposition that I wrote and rewrote to make as clear as possible. And painstakingly laying out page after page of what on May 14, 2002, would be published as A New Kind of Science.

I’ve written before (even in the book itself) about the intellectual journey involved in the creation of A New Kind of Science. But here I want to share some of the more practical “behind the scenes” journey of the making of what I and others usually now call simply “the NKS book”. Some of what I’ll talk about happened twenty years ago, some more like thirty years ago. And it’s been interesting to go back into my archives (and, yes, those backup tapes from 30 years ago were hard to read!) and relive some of what finally led to the delivery of the ideas and results of A New Kind of Science as truckloads of elegantly printed books with striking covers. Continue reading