Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

May 9, 2003

From: Interview by John Russell, Bio-ITWorld

Why did you self-publish A New Kind of Science? Why not present your ideas in a peer-reviewed journal, where they could be assessed by other scientists?

Well, you just need to go to Amazon.com to see a lot of comments on the book. Most of them are bull____. This is too big a thing to propagate through the standard mechanism of science. As a person who’s published a journal for the last 17 years (Complex Systems), I know how that works. Basically, it’s a good system for [disseminating] incremental progress in science. It’s almost laughably absurd if you’re trying to do something as big as what I am trying to do.

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