“Once dismissed as a relic of the Middle Ages, the spirit of metaphysical speculation is alive and well — in computer science.
Over candlelight in cathedrals and monkish cells, medieval metaphysicians quarreled over ultimate mysteries of reality, such as: What is the nature of God? Are there other universes besides ours? And could God create other universes, if He wished?
Nowadays, with a daring that might have dazzled St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, two titans of the computer world argue that everything in the universe is a kind of computer.
Their sensational idea originally enjoyed a brief flurry of celebrity in the late 1980s, when one of the two, Ed Fredkin, proposed a particularly grandiose version of the idea. Now the idea is enjoying renewed publicity thanks to the publicity campaign run by the other man, Stephen Wolfram, to promote his book on the topic.
Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science” is a five-pound, 1,200-page tome that has become a freak summer best-seller, rivaling John Grisham and Danielle Steel in sales. Thanks to an intensive publicity campaign, Wolfram is now the Britney Spears of science, whose self-published work has drawn a mostly gushing response from media, while some scientists are agog — or aghast.”
More of this San Francisco Chronicle article at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/07/01/MN108224.DTL