![]() ![]() But I thought what I was doing was important, and I really liked the idea of giving other people the opportunity to share the enjoyment of the things I was discovering. So I had to come up with some way to communicate it all. Publishing lots of piecemeal academic papers in the journals of dozens of fields wasn’t going to work. And instead it seemed like the best path was just to figure out as much as I could, and then present it to the world all together in a coherent way. Which in practice meant I had to write a book.īack in 1991 I thought it might take me a year, maybe two, to do this. But I kept on discovering more and more. What was I going to do with all this? I suppose I could have just kept it all to myself. After all, by that time I was the CEO of a successful company, and certainly didn’t make my living by publishing research. And that had gone very well. But after I built Mathematica, I started being able to discover things faster and faster. I had a great time. And pretty soon I had material for many tens-if not hundreds-of academic papers. And what’s more, the things I was discovering were starting to fit together, and give me a whole new way of thinking. In the early years, I’d just done what scientists typically do, publishing papers in academic journals and giving talks at academic conferences. And I had been amazed-almost shocked-at many of the things I’d discovered. And I knew that communicating it all to the world wouldn’t be easy. ![]() I had been building up the science in the book for the better part of 20 years. But it was different having it all unfold right around me. I had been a devoted student of the history of science for many years, so I thought I knew the patterns. He went on, though, explaining that surely the main points of the book must be wrong. And if they weren’t wrong, they must have been done before. The conversation went back and forth. I had known this person for years, and the depth of his emotion surprised me. After all, I was the one who had just spent a decade on the book. Why was he the one who was so worked up about it?Īnd then I realized: this is what a paradigm shift sounds like-up close and personal. I explained that I didn’t write the book to destroy anything, and that actually I’d spent all those years working hard to add what I hoped was an important new chapter to human knowledge. And, by the way-as one might guess from the existence of Mathematica-I personally happen to be quite a fan of the tradition of mathematics. “You’re destroying the heritage of mathematics back to ancient Greek times!” With great emotion, so said a distinguished mathematical physicist to me just after A New Kind of Science was published ten years ago. The previous post covered developments since the book was published the next covers its future.) (This is the second of a series of posts related to next week’s tenth anniversary of A New Kind of Science. ![]()
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