When Stephen Wolfram came to the Institute at the advanced
age of twenty-three, he was put into a first-floor corner office in the astro-
physicists' building. Wolfram didn't really belong there, though, because
he wasn't an astrophysicist. But he didn't belong with the particle physi-
cists, either, because he also wasn't a particle physicist. Stephen Wolfram
was in a new category altogether, one for which there was as yet no name.

Later, when the Institute gave him a whole suite of offices, to
accommodate himself, his staff, and their combined computer gear, there
was still no name for the type of physics they were doing, although for
a while they thought of themselves as the dynamical systems group. The
reason there was no name for what they were doing is that the field didn't
exist yet: no one had ever done it before.

Most scientists restrict themselves to one narrow subject matter -- to
globular clusters, for example, or solar neutrinos, or fruit flies -- but Wolf-
ram had a far grander goal in view. He wanted to explain not the complex-
ity of any given phenomenon, but complexity itself, wherever it might be
found, whether in the structure of galaxies, or in turbulent fluids, or in
the nucleotide sequences of a DNA molecule. He wanted to understand
complexity, what's more, not in terms of the usual vehicle of mainstream
physics, which is to say the differential equation, but in terms of something
that was essentially new in science, the abstract, pattern-generating mech-
anisms known as cellular automata.

Cellular automata are not real things, they're only abstractions,
creatures of the intellect. But they're big with Wolfram and his cohorts
because it turns out that, when these imaginary mechanisms are simulated
by a computer, they replicate the operations of physical systems that are
actually found in nature. This is a bit uncanny. It's as if someone wrote a
novel -- an utter fiction -- and then discovered that everything in the novel
had actually happened.

There was the time Wolfram produced the seashell pattern, for
example. He was working with a simple cellular automaton -- the computer

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