Stephen Wolfram and the techno-dianetics of Google-ology

Physics prodigy turned software entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram can fairly claim to have revolutionized the math software niche with the 1988 launch of Mathematica, and that must have given him a taste for being the guy who revolutionized something, because with his 2002 book, A New Kind of Science), he set out to revolutionize nearly every scientific discipline at one whack, from biology to cognitive science to physics to cryptography. But the NKS revolution turned out much like the Segway revolution that slightly preceded it: lots of media hype and big talk—mostly from Wolfram himself—about how the world would never be the same, followed by the launch of something that, to this day, lives on mainly as an interesting geek curiosity.

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