Notes on Science in the twentieth century: a social-intellectual survey
Goldman, Steven L., 1941-
[sound recording]

Lecture 1. The evolution of 20th-Century science --
Lecture 2. Redefining reality --
Lecture 3. Quantum theory makes its appearance --
Lecture 4. The heroic "old" age of quantum theory --
Lecture 5. A newer theory-QED --
Lecture 6. QED meets fission and fusion --
Lecture 7. Learning by smashing --
Lecture 8. What good is QED? --
Lecture 9. The newest theory-quantum chromodynamics --
Lecture 10. Unifying nature --
Lecture 11. Chemists become designers --
Lecture 12. Mathematics and truth --
Lecture 13. Mathematics and reality --
Lecture 14. The universe expands --
Lecture 15. What is the universe? --
Lecture 16. How do we know what's out there? --
Lecture 17. From equilibrium to dynamism --
Lecture 18. Subterranean fury --
Lecture 19. Solar system citizen --
Lecture 20. Science organized, adopted, co-opted --
Lecture 21. Techno-science and globalization --
Lecture 22. The evolution of evolution --
Lecture 23. Human evolution --
Lecture 24. Genetics-from Mendel to molecules --
Lecture 25. Molecular biology --
Lecture 26. Molecular medicine --
Lecture 27. Culture-anthropology and archaeology --
Lecture 28. Culture-history --
Lecture 29. Culture-linguistics --
Lecture 30. Society-sociology --
Lecture 31. Society-political science --
Lecture 32. Society-economics --
Lecture 33. Mind-classical and behavioral psychology --
Lecture 34. Mind-cybernetics, AI, connectionism --
Lecture 35. Looking back --
Lecture 36. Looking around and looking ahead.

My notes from A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram

2 October 2006

Preface
"Throughout the book my primary concern is with basic science and fundamental issues. But building on the foundations in the book there are a vast array of applications - both conceptual and practical - that can now be developed.

No doubt some will come quickly. But most will take decades to emerge. Yet in time I expect the ideas in this books will come to pervade not only science and technology but also many areas of general thinking." (p. xi)

I hope that I can come up with some small applications using this book.
Wolfram had many collaborators from many facets of science... a very complex list.
Would be worth examining the connections in this network sometime.

Chapter 1 The Foundations for A New Kind of Science
"I did what is in a sense one of the most elementary imaginable computer experiments: I took a sequnce of simple programs and then systematically ran them to see how they behaved. And what I found - to my great surprise - was that despite the simplicity of their rules, the behavior of the program was often far from simple. Indeed, even some of the very simplest programs that I looked at had behavior that was as complex as anything I had ever seen." (p. 2)

This reminds me of my own fascination on programming the rules for John Conway's Game of Life for the first time.

"... what secret is it that allows nature seemingly so effortlessly to produce so much to us that appears to us so complex." (p. 2)

" But how these componenets act together to produce even some of the most obvious features of the overall behavior we see has in the past remained an almost complete mystery." (p. 3)

The thought here is similar to what I have heard Leroy Hood talk about regarding systems biology.

"But on the basis if many discoveries I have been led to a still more sweeping conclusion, summarized in what I call the Principle of Computational Equivalence: that whenveer one sees behaviorthat is not obviously simple - in esssentially any system - it can be thought of as corresponding to a computation of equivalent sophistication." (p. 5)

"... for across a vast range of systems, from simple programs to brains to our whole universe, the principle implies that there is a basic equivalence that makes the same fundamental phenomena occur, and allows the same basic scientific ideas and methods to be used." (p. 6-7)

Chapter 2 Crucial Experiment

Notes from The H. Paul Rockwood Memorial Lecture: A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram UC San Diego April 30, 2003




Intro by Terrence Sejnowski
Director Institute for Neural Computation

Wolfram Science Website


Cellular automata 1981

Rule 30

Rule 110

"Its sort of interesting to think about how we interact with the ultimate limits of technology. I don't have any doubt that there will be a time, potentially quite soon when it will be possible to capture all the important features of human thinking in pieces of sold-state electronics and no doubt things will get more and more efficent until everything is on an atomic scalle so that our processes of human thinking are just implemented by individual electrons whizzing around in lumps of something."

Computational equivalence


"... if everything was computationally reducible, then nothing could be acheived by history."

worked every day and every night for 10 years while CEO of Wolfram Research

NKS represents a Kuhnian paradigm shift.

Took 20 years to think about... so read it carefully. Read the notes.
Used Mathematica as notation.

Look at NKSX - NKS Explorer.

Summary of NKS
1. New areas of basic science.
2. Whole bunches of applications.
3. Conceptual directions.

First Scanning tunneling microscope
IBM Research Zurich 1981
(Explanation from Deutsches Museum with wiki hyperlinks added by me)

Top view

Side View

The scanning tunneling microscope has given rise to new possibilities of investigating surfaces on the scale of individual atoms. Rather than "seeing" the atoms, the instrument "feels" them by scanning the surface line by line with a very sharp tip at a constant distance of a few atomic diameters. This distance is minimized in a feedback loop by the tunneling current tip and sample when a voltage is applied. The current is extremely dependent on the distance between tip and sample - the smaller the distance, the larger the current. Reducing the distance by only one-tenth of a nanometer (a millonth of a millimeter) increase the current tenfold. A tripod of piezoelectric rods allows very precise movement of the microscope tip in all directions. By applyingand removing a voltage, these elements expand and shrink, between 0.1 and 10 picometers (a billionth of a millimeter) per millivolt.

The STM measurement results constitute a field of scanned lines from which a three-dimensional image of the surface can be obtained in millionfold magnification e.g. by computer image processing.

Since the breakthrough of the first STM in 1981, numerous further developments and variations quickly led to a wealth of new knowledge in quite diverse research areas. The STM principle is generally considered a key in nanotechnology owing to its capability to image surfaces and investigate their properties on the nanometer scale.
and ultimately, even to change structures atom by atom. The first significant step in the latter direction was the controlled deposition of individual atoms in 1990.

The invention of the scanning tunneling microscope brough Gerd Binnig , a German, and Heinrich Rohrer Rohrer, a Swiss, both from IBM Zurich Reasearch Laboratory, the physics Nobel prize in 1986.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope

See also:
http://www.deutsches-museum-bonn.de/ausstellungen/meisterwerke/2_5raster/raster_e.html