Editing A New Kind of Science (section)

===The fundamental theory (''NKS'' Chapter 9)===
Wolfram's speculations of a direction toward a fundamental theory of physics have been criticized as vague and obsolete. [[Scott Aaronson]], Professor of Computer Science at University of Texas Austin, also claims that Wolfram's methods cannot be compatible with both [[special relativity]] and [[Bell's theorem]] violations, and hence cannot explain the observed results of [[Bell test]]s.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Aaronson|first=Scott|title=Book Review of ''A New Kind of Science'' (Postscript file)|journal=Quantum Information and Computation|volume=2|issue=5|year=2002|pages=410–423|doi=10.26421/QIC2.5-7|url=http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.ps}}</ref>

[[Edward Fredkin]] and [[Konrad Zuse]] pioneered the idea of a [[Cellular automaton#CA as models of the fundamental physical reality|computable universe]], the former by writing a line in his book on how the world might be like a cellular automaton, later further developed by Fredkin using a toy model called Salt.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.math.usf.edu/~eclark/ANKOS_zuse_fredkin_thesis.html|title=ZUSE-FREDKIN-THESIS|work=usf.edu}}</ref> It has been claimed that ''NKS'' tries to take these ideas as its own, but Wolfram's model of the universe is a rewriting network, not a cellular automaton, as Wolfram himself has suggested a cellular automaton cannot account for relativistic features such as no absolute time frame.<ref>{{Cite web | url=https://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/section-9.7 | title=Fundamental Physics: A New Kind of Science &#124; Online by Stephen Wolfram}}</ref> [[Jürgen Schmidhuber]] has also charged that his work on [[Turing machine]]-computable [[physics]] was stolen without attribution, namely his idea on enumerating possible Turing-computable universes.<ref name=Schmid>{{cite web|last=Schmidhuber|first=Jürgen|title=Origin of main ideas in Wolfram's book "A New Kind of Science"|url=https://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/wolfram.html|publisher=CERN Courier}}</ref>

In a 2002 review of ''NKS'', the Nobel laureate and elementary particle physicist [[Steven Weinberg]] wrote, "Wolfram himself is a lapsed elementary particle physicist, and I suppose he can't resist trying to apply his experience with digital computer programs to the laws of nature. This has led him to the view (also considered in a 1981 paper by Richard Feynman) that nature is discrete rather than continuous. He suggests that space consists of a set of isolated points, like cells in a cellular automaton, and that even time flows in discrete steps. Following an idea of Edward Fredkin, he concludes that the universe itself would then be an automaton, like a giant computer. It's possible, but I can't see any motivation for these speculations, except that this is the sort of system that Wolfram and others have become used to in their work on computers. So might a carpenter, looking at the moon, suppose that it is made of wood."<ref>{{Cite journal|author=Weinberg, S.|title=Is the Universe a Computer?|journal=The New York Review of Books|date=24 October 2002|volume=49 |issue=16 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/15762}}</ref>