I imagine that when his theory of relativity was published in 1905, Albert Einstein did not become a celebrity overnight. It probably wouldn’t have been until atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the significance of the work of Dr. Einstein, Max Planck and other physicists began slowly to seep into popular consciousness.

This month, we have been put into the same position people were in back in 1905. A new theory has been published, for which much is claimed, and people the world over have begun to try to understand it, and fix it in its proper position in the tapestry of our knowledge.

As is almost always the case with science, it is a difficult task, because the new theory has, for the public, little familiar context. The 1,263-page book in which it is formally announced, published by the author, and released at the beginning of May, is called A New Kind of Science. Think about that title for a second. It doesn’t take long to realise that while the author may suffer from all kinds of things, false modesty is not one of them. But perhaps he knows better than we do. The book is already reaching the bestseller lists. In the middle of last week, it was number two on Amazon.com’s list. On the same day, it was number 19 on the New York Times list.

The author is Dr. Stephen Wolfram. The facts about him, as given in an article in Forbes magazine a few months ago, are as follows: “Stephen Wolfram was born in London in 1959. His father is a moderately successful novelist; his late mother was an Oxford don in philosophy. A brilliant child, he earned a scholarship to Eton College at age 13— By 14, he had written his own book on particle physics; by 17, he had a scientific paper published in the journal Nuclear Physics.

“He attended Oxford University on a scholarship and, during the summer after his first year, went to work in the Theoretical High-Energy Physics Groups at the Argonne National Laboratory. That summer, Wolfram wrote a scientific paper on heavy quark production that soon became a classic in the field — and he turned 18.

“A year later, in 1978, Wolfram was invited to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) by legendary scientist Murray Gell-Mann. There his brilliant reputation gathered momentum: He invented the Fox-Wolfram variables in particle physics, discovered the Politzer-Wolfram upper bound on the mass of quarks, and published more than 25 scientific papers. The work he did in just his first year at Caltech earned him a Ph.D. in theoretical physics.

“In 1980 he joined the Caltech faculty, and in 1981, at age 21, he was awarded a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship — not for any single piece of work but for the ‘breadth of his thinking’.”

In 1988, he founded Wolfram Research Inc., to market Mathematica, a scientific software program he wrote to facilitate complex mathematical calculations, that is now a standard, popular tool for scientists around the globe. Dr. Wolfram has worked on “A New Kind of Science” for something like ten years. Publication of the book was as much anticipated in the scientific world as the publication of a long-lost Elvis album might be in another.

His theory is simple, but radical. He believes that all phenomena, no matter how complex, grow from simple, basic rules. Scientists looking for explanations to those things in life we do not understand should be looking for the simplicity that underlies them, he says, not carving the phenomena themselves into smaller and ever more digestible pieces.

“If the whole history of our universe can be obtained by following definite, simple rules,” Dr. Wolfram writes, “then at some level this history has the same kind of character as a construct such as the digital sequence of pi. And what this suggests is that it makes no more or less sense to talk about the meaning of phenomena in our universe than it does to talk about the meaning of phenomena in the digit sequence of pi.”

The significance of what he says is that everything— the play of the weather, the movement of financial markets, the patterns on sea shells, the evolution of species— is the result of a set of instructions as simple as an eight-step software program.

As Dennis Overbye pointed out in the New York Times last week: “The idea that complex things can arise from simple ones is as old as Euclid, who built a whole geometry out of a few axioms and logic, but the giant on whose shoulders Dr. Wolfram is most securely standing is the English mathematician, Alan Turing. In 1936, Mr. Turing and Dr. Alonzo Church, a Princeton mathematician, showed that in principle, any mathematical or logical problem that could be solved by a person could be solved by a so-called Turing machine. As envisioned by Mr. Turing it was like the head of a modern tape recorder that would move back and forth along an endless tape, reading symbols inscribed on it and writing new ones. Moreover, a so-called universal Turing machine could emulate any other conceivable computer.

“From that point on, Windows 95 and the Internet were only matters of time and transistor technology.”

There are seven possible steps for a Turing machine. They’re pretty simple: read the tape, move the tape left, move it right, write 0 on the tape, write 1 on it, jump to another command, and halt. Dr Wolfram is proposing a set of instructions containing eight steps. So Mr. Overbye really might have gone the extra step himself and acknowledged that from Turing on, Windows, the Internet and the unlocking of all the mysteries of the universe were only matters of time, transistor technology and Dr. Stephen Wolfram.

Dr. Wolfram’s theory challenges the ideas at the centre of almost every scientific discipline on the books. Biology, chemistry, physics, fluid dynamics, cosmology — there is no corner of the scientific world that, in Dr Wolfram’s mind, cannot be revolutionised by his cellular automata model.

For example, one of the most important and admired documents of modern palaeontology is the late Stephen Jay Gould’s doctoral thesis on shells. According to Dr. Gould, the fact that there are thousands of potential shell shapes in the world, but only half a dozen actual shell forms, is evidence of natural selection at work.

Not so, says Dr. Wolfram. There was, he said, a mathematical error in Dr Gould’s work. His work demonstrates there are only six possible shell shapes, and they all exist in the world. Natural selection, he says, is not needed to pare organisms down to a few robust forms. Rather, organisms evolve outward to fill all possible forms available to them by the rules of cellular automata.

“I’ve come to believe,” Dr Wolfram is quoted as having said, “that natural selection is not all that important.” So much for poor old Charles Darwin.

What are cellular automata? They are “cellular” because this branch of science deals with units on a larger grid, “automata” because they automatically follow a simple rule. The theory languished as little more than a mathematical novelty for two decades, the kind of topic an ambitious graduate student might pick up, write a paper about, and then drop to pursue something else. But in the 1960s, things began to change — not in the world of theory but, ironically, because of a computer software game. It was called Life and was devised by John Conway, a Cambridge University mathematician.

It is a game of creation vaguely like SimCity. Described, it sounds like a boring and static game. But, on the contrary, players find that whole worlds unexpectedly open up, creating a fascinating and powerful metaphor for creation on a large scale. Anyone interested might go to this web page, www.radicaleye.com/lifepage/. I’m sure there are others, but this one seems to contain just about everything anyone could possibly want to know about the game, including the software so that you can play it yourself.

The point here, though, is that Dr. Wolfram, when he discovered Life, was fascinated, and began to ask some key questions — What if the universe itself is a kind of computer? What if that computer operates from a simple beginning and a few rules? The experience set the trajectory of his life for the next 20 years. Dr. Wolfram’s critics say he misunderstands the importance of what he has done. They criticise him for his self-aggrandising tone and say that his treatise is compelling, but ultimately overstated and incomplete. (No prize for guessing that’s not too far from what scientists said about Einstein a century ago.) Nonetheless, the result of Dr Wolfram’s 20 years of work is that he has given us a truly remarkable book, no matter whether it turns out to be the new “kind of science” he advertises, and therefore a great book, or just another fascinating side journey on the way.

gshorto[AT]ibl.bm