Every couple of years a maverick scientist appears who promises to completely revolutionise the basis of science. Their writings are (in some German scientists saying) 'at the boundary between chemistry and madness'. In most cases, after a couple of years of scrutiny, it is found that it was much more on the side of madness than chemistry.

Once in a while, very seldom, one of them proves to be right (of course, the younger the scientists, the more eager they are to adopt the new thinking; some of the older scientists will die still thinking that the new approach is wrong) and his thinking only to look mad at the first glance (Planck, Einstein,...) but to be on the sound side of chemistry.

Wolfram's work looks very promising to me at the first glance (main reason: his thinking doesn't use completely new speculative concepts without empirical foundation, as e.g. Sheldrake, but 'just' a new approach and methodology).

I'm looking forward to the next ten years of testing this idea. We'll see whether his thinking will be proved to have a fatal flaw, or to open a new more or less large branch of science, or to be the basis for a new approach in all sciences unifying physics (as a special case) with the life sciences.

I welcome this approach for the same reasons Amos has problems with it: Utter complexity coming from the interaction of a few simple 'programs' may make arguments about 'mind', 'soul' or whatever being undispensable to explain complex human behaviour more difficult to defend.

Wolfgang