Science & Tech Quote by Rudy Rucker

Calling Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science "wonderful" while stressing he's "still absorbing its teachings" is a careful kind of endorsement: enthusiastic, but not credulous. Rucker is a working scientist with one foot in the countercultural fringes of math and computation, and that mix matters. He isn't offering a sealed verdict; he's modeling a posture. The phrase "in any case" quietly concedes the surrounding controversy: NKS arrived with maximal ambition, a big-book confidence that irritated many researchers who felt it overclaimed, repackaged prior work, or tried to brute-force its way into scientific canon. Rucker nods to that noise without feeding it.

The more interesting move is "absorbing" and "teachings". Scientists usually say they're evaluating claims, checking proofs, running comparisons. "Teachings" has the flavor of apprenticeship, even quasi-doctrinal transmission. It's a subtle admission that Wolfram's project isn't merely a set of results; it's a proposed way of seeing. Rucker is signaling that the book's value lies in its worldview - cellular automata as a generative metaphor, computation as the substrate of nature - and that such a worldview takes time to metabolize.

There's also reputational strategy here. By praising the book's imaginative force while framing himself as a learner, Rucker avoids staking his authority on a polarizing manifesto. He keeps the door open: NKS may be wrong in particulars, but it can still be "wonderful" as an engine for scientific imagination, the kind that makes new questions feel inevitable.