The first chapter of the Book is also free of much technical detail. Entitled “The Foundations For A New Kind Of Science,” Wolfram discusses what events led him in this direction. He talks about his personal story in writing the book and how it relates to other areas.

Chapter One is also plugged with notes. Wolfram just can’t give me enough information. But I will admit, the story is pulling me into the Book, a little bit at a time. His big “sweeping conclusion” is The Principle of Computational Equivalence. What this distills down to is that any complex system can arise from the same universal conditions. It doesn’t matter if you start with bumblebees or ferrite ions, the important thing is what you end up with and how it got there. Got that?

He looks at past initiatives(“Artificial Life,” “Chaos Theory,” “Nanotechnology”) and finds them all lacking in…something. It all goes back to a crude set of programs he tried to run as a young lad in 1973 on an old British computer. He tried it again in 1981 using a better machine and then things got real interesting.

A good term for what he’s pursuing might be the study of complex systems, but that one comes with too much baggage. I’d like to see him use “Neo-Alchemy”, because I’m a chemist and I think it sounds neat. And he also points out in the notes to chapter one: “…the notion of a single underlying substance that could be transmitted into anything- living or not- was also a centerpiece of alchemy.” So what we may have here is not the question to the answer “forty-two”, but the inscription that Hermes Trismegistos wrote on the other emerald tablet, the one we never saw.