I once went to a talk by Wolfram to an audience of academics which he finished by saying that if he managed to find the theory of everything (which he seemed to think was a possibility), he probably wouldn't bother telling people, since theoretical physicists wouldn't understand it.
But isn't this the ultimate point of "science studies" (broadly put) since the days of Kuhn, Lakatos, Latour and so on?
I mean, Wolfram's bizarre confirmation bias about discrete automata is (apparently) apparent to the computer-y people because we've seen discrete automata and have goofed with all sorts of complexity-generating simple formalisms (L-systems, genetic algorithms, ...) that are impressive for giggles (and some industrial applications) but don't amount to a kind of Kurzweilian Transcendence.
... but we're not all mathy enough to pick apart what string/brane theorists or even orthodox quantum gravitationists are doing and say with (possibly misguided) confidence that it's no hope for a theory of everything. The people who do are continental philosophers who tend to get laughed out of the room, often because they have silly overarching theories (Zizek has a couple of points about quantum physics, but then, he thinks psychoanalysis explains human history) that must be relentlessly mocked.
> The people who do are continental philosophers who tend to get laughed out of the room
And for good reason. For example, philosophers (Zizek included) raved about Badiou's Number and Numbers. It is a nice history of the approaches to formalizing the concept of number, but there is no philosophy there. As soon as Badiou or Derrida or any other continental philosophers try to do anything else with mathematics it just becomes a grossly inappropriate and confusing analogy.
>he thinks psychoanalysis explains human history
The kind of theoritical psychoanalysis Zizek talks about is not really classic psychoanalysis at all. Even Marxism at the lowest level is a theory of psychology.
I think Stephen may be confusing communication with understanding. True genius inspiration can be hard or even impossible to communicate as languages are an imperfect representation of what happens in our minds, especially the "genius mind."
Not that it excuses his sentiment at all. Seemingly too arrogant to take the time to contemplate himself in an honest light.
I'm not sure I get it. Is that a dig at how computationalism is met with skepticism among theoretical physicists?
More likely a dig at Wolframs gargantuan ego.
I wonder if he would have the balls to say that if Feynman was still around?
For what it's worth, Feynman was on Wolfram's dissertation committee
http://thesis.library.caltech.edu/2597/