A New Kind of Science
Stephen Wolfram
9 people recommended it in 6 threads, 2013–2024.
1 commenter pushed back on it — worth reading the threads.
What people on Hacker News said
These tiny books in combination with some other similar books and ideas transformed the way I think about the world, physically, biologically, technologically - all from the perspective of computation - in terms of computational reducibility, kolmogorov complexity, emergence and entropy (RE maxwells demon - the meaning of life? more like the universal property resulting in the emergence of life like patterns and fluctuations in energy and matter)... sorry all a bit vauge, but difficult to articulate succinctly, read the (very short) books and maybe you will latch on to the same train of thought, it was mentally transformative for me.
The thesis of A New Kind of Science (NKS) is twofold: the nature of computation must be explored experimentally, and the results of these experiments have great relevance to understanding the physical world.
Simple rules can yield arbitrarily complex behavior. Therefore reality is inherently computational from the lowest levels.
Potentially a bit dated now, but A New Kind of Science by Wolfram was pretty eye opening.
Where it comes up
- Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before? 2020 · 2 recommendations
- Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything? 2019 · 2 recommendations
- Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models? 2017 · 2 recommendations
- Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read? 2024 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: What are the most thought-provoking books that you have read? 2015 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: What book are you reading? 2013 · 1 recommendation