Roads to Reality
Penrose and Wolfram Compared
Contenders
Roger Penrose:
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to
the Laws of the Universe
London: Jonathan Cape (2004), xxviii + 1094
pages, ISBN 0-224-04447-8
Sir Roger Penrose, retired professor of
mathematics at the University of Oxford and collaborator with Stephen
Hawking on black hole theory, has written "a complete guide to the laws of
the universe" called The Road to Reality. His publisher calls it the most
important and ambitious work of science for a generation. Penrose caused a
furore in the world of consciousness studies with his 1989 book The
Emperor's New Mind, which conjectured a new mechanism for consciousness and
kept a faithful band of researchers busy for a decade with models based on
microtubules and the like. Sadly, the idea fizzled out. The title of the
2002 Tucson "Toward a Science of Consciousness" conference poetry slam
winner was: Microtubules – my ass!
Stephen Wolfram:
A New Kind of
Science
Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media (2002), xvi, 1264 pages, ISBN
1-57955-008-8
Stephen Wolfram, by contrast, is a maverick loner. Educated
at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech, recipient of a MacArthur "genius" award,
multimillionaire creator of Mathematica — "now the world's leading software
system for technical computing and symbolic programming" (to cite his own
dust jacket blurb), he is both author and publisher of the massive volume
A
New Kind of Science. He regards it as the most important and ambitious work
of science for three centuries. Yes, Wolfram wishes to be known as the next
Newton. He sees human mental processes as embodied computations and hence as
equivalent to many irreducible processes in nature, such as weather or the
particle dance in rocks.
Whose book should you read?
Read the rest
in
Journal of Consciousness Studies
12(2), 78-83 (2005)
(PDF, 6 pages, 65 KB)
