Rules and Methods

Instead of your grammar school times tables, our kids will learn the rules shown above.

These are taken from the Mathematica 8 documentation provided by Wolfram Research Inc..

I learned them around 1990, when I got hooked to Stephen Wolfram brilliant productions. He hasn't stopped, and now he is wealthy; good for him!

Talking to Zeleny during his Chilpancingo visit, I got the following thoughts in my head.

I may never know what Information is,;the it from bit, bit. Nevertheless, I could definitely  state what additions to the scientific method can be produced by the new instruments in our hands: hardware & software. Mathematica being high in my list of powerful instruments.

In this series of notes I begin reflecting on what I have learned using computers.

We live in an uncertain world. Nowhere I see the certainty seemingly implied by the precise equations of Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein. Notwithstanding their strong belief in reality, I find the classical view of the world painfully lacking in predictive, and even more, descriptive qualities. The worldview presented, is not even contained in their equations; with computers we can see that chaos can appear, as soon as non linearities are allowed. Our classical solar system is chaotic, even in Newton's terms, as Stan Peale, Jack Wisdom, and Gerry Sussman, among others, have shown.

I second Wolfram; our best description of reality is through computer programs, not by formulas. The formula view of the world is dead, the program one is alive. The universe is more alive than dead!