Editing A New Kind of Science (section)

===Systematic abstract science===
While Wolfram advocates simple programs as a scientific discipline, he also argues that its methodology will revolutionize other fields of science. The basis of his argument is that the study of simple programs is the minimal possible form of science, grounded equally in both [[abstraction]] and empirical experimentation. Every aspect of the methodology ''NKS'' advocates is optimized to make experimentation as direct, easy, and meaningful as possible while maximizing the chances that the experiment will do something unexpected. Just as this methodology allows computational mechanisms to be studied in their simplest forms, Wolfram argues that the process of doing so engages with the mathematical basis of the physical world, and therefore has much to offer the sciences.

Wolfram argues that the computational realities of the universe make science hard for fundamental reasons. But he also argues that by understanding the importance of these realities, we can learn to use them in our favor. For instance, instead of [[reverse engineering]] our theories from observation, we can [[enumeration|enumerate]] systems and then try to match them to the behaviors we observe. A major theme of ''NKS''  is investigating the structure of the possibility space. Wolfram argues that science is far too ad hoc, in part because the models used are too complicated and unnecessarily organized around the limited primitives of traditional mathematics. Wolfram advocates using models whose variations are enumerable and whose consequences are straightforward to compute and analyze.