I love NKS and think Wolfram is one of the best Math and even science explainers out there. Yes, he doesn't know the meaning of the word "humility" but I honestly don't care.
He advertises NKS as some sort of revolution, but I don't care about these claims either. What I do care is the clarity of his explanations and the quality of the book overall.
Stephen Wolfram isn't my idol. But I get a ton of value listening to him nonetheless. He's a genius and a rare one who can bridge the gap with the layman.
His blog posts are really great, his post on chatGPT [1] is probably the best "0 to literate" explainer for a curious but non-technical person. And the fact that there's real runnable Mathematica code interspersed just makes everything so tangible, and is quite a testament to how succinct, powerful, and readable the language is.
He also posts (and sometimes livestreams?) videos of some design discussion meetings at Wolfram "live CEOing", it's a rare glimpse at how he is in an "unpolished" form. From the few videos I sampled, he came off as pleasant and amiable.
Twenty years later Wolfram ideas are still popular and showing that it is physicists that are reevaluating his theories
Ie Its LEGITIMATE NICHE RESEARCH PROGRAM not a crackpot by any means also his ideas are useful in the digital physics community
Some
Evidence:
specifically evidence outside Wolfram’s own ecosystem, and the picture has changed since the Physics Project launched in 2020.
I think there is now enough peer-reviewed work, independent citation, and engagement by serious physics departments that dismissing it as merely “crackpot physics” is also hard to justify. It has become a legitimate, though still highly speculative and niche, research program.
Here are the strongest recent examples I found, roughly in order of evidential value:
1. Foundations of Physics, 2024 — an independent researcher explicitly develops the Wolfram Model. Furkan Semih Dündar of Amasya University published A Case Study for Leibnizian Ideas in Wolfram Model in Springer’s Foundations of Physics. This matters because it is not a Wolfram blog post: it went through a conventional academic journal and explicitly treats the Wolfram Model as something worth investigating. The paper is cautious—it calls some interpretations speculative—which actually makes it better evidence of genuine academic engagement rather than promotion.
2. International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 2024 — substantial mathematical development of the framework. Xerxes Arsiwalla and Jonathan Gorard published Pregeometric Spaces from Wolfram Model Rewriting Systems as Homotopy Types in Springer’s International Journal of Theoretical Physics. They connect Wolfram rewriting systems to homotopy type theory, higher categories and approaches to quantum gravity. This isn’t independent in the same sense—both authors have strong connections to the project—but it means the mathematics is getting through normal peer review and entering the conventional theoretical-physics literature. A copy is also deposited in Cambridge University’s research repository.
3. European Physical Journal C, 2025 — perhaps the most interesting independent signal. A 2025 theoretical-physics paper by Ali Chamseddine, Ola Malaeb and Sara Najem on discrete gravity cites both Gorard’s Wolfram Model work and Wolfram’s original Physics Project paper directly in its survey of approaches to discrete/network geometry. More importantly, look at the intellectual company it keeps in the references: causal sets, quantum graphity, Regge calculus, causal dynamical triangulations, Carlo Rovelli and spin foams, and other established discrete-gravity programs.
Especially with the failure of string theories -We see many physicists treating the Wolfram Model as one of the approaches in the literature that needs to be cited when discussing emergent/discrete spacetime.
4. A serious academic quantum-gravity book now places Wolfram’s ideas alongside established researchers. Routledge published Quantum Gravity and Computation: Information, Pregeometry, and Digital Physics in late 2025/copyright 2026. Stephen Wolfram contributes the chapter On the Nature of Time, and there is a separate chapter called Ruliology: Linking Computation, Observers and Physical Law. The volume also includes work by established researchers including Paul Davies, Gerard Milburn, Vlatko Vedral, Chiara Marletto, Daniele Oriti and Renate Loll.
I would put quite a bit of weight on this. It doesn’t imply that Vedral, Loll, Oriti, etc. endorse the Ruliad. But it does show that computational/pregeometric ideas associated with Wolfram are now participating in an academic conversation with researchers from established quantum-information and quantum-gravity programs.
5. Brown University’s Physics Department gave Wolfram a dedicated two-hour physics colloquium in May 2025. The title was Computation All the Way Down: The Machine Code of Physics & Other Applications. This wasn’t a tech entrepreneurship event; it was hosted by Brown’s Department of Physics and listed as a physics colloquium.
Again, universities invite controversial people all the time, so an invitation isn’t endorsement. But major physics departments generally don’t give two-hour research colloquia to completely unserious theories.
6. Cambridge’s 2025–26 Maxwell Lecture went to Wolfram. The Cambridge University Physics Society selected him for its Maxwell Lecture, whose Cambridge listing explicitly describes the lecture as dedicated to “ground-breaking theoretical & computational physics research and discoveries.” His subject was Computation at the Foundations of Everything — Physics and More, including his recent foundational-physics work. It was run in partnership with the Cambridge Mathematical Society.
This is one of the cleaner institutional-respectability signals.
7. King’s College London went considerably further in October 2025. King’s Department of Mathematics and King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence jointly hosted Wolfram before a packed audience of students and staff. More interestingly, Nikolay Gromov, a Professor of Theoretical Physics, explicitly discussed the research Wolfram presented, including the work with Jonathan Gorard, and described it as “fascinating and inspiring.”
The King’s headline itself is revealing: “King’s explores new scientific paradigm with creator of Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram.” That’s not acceptance of the theory, but it is a mainstream university treating the program as intellectually serious.
8. Brian Greene / World Science Festival devoted more than two hours to the actual physics in 2025. Wolfram sat down with Columbia physicist Brian Greene specifically to examine whether space, time, general relativity and quantum mechanics can emerge computationally. This wasn’t a five-minute publicity segment. The World Science Festival page currently shows roughly 239,000 views, 4,200+ likes and 800+ comments, so it is also actual evidence of growing public/scientific interest.
This is much weaker evidence for scientific acceptance than the papers above, but quite strong evidence for increased visibility among scientifically literate audiences.
9. The London Institute for Mathematical Sciences hosted him specifically to discuss foundational physics in October 2025. LIMS describes Wolfram as a theoretical physicist and calls his work a “radical new framework for fundamental physics.” The event was a discussion of foundational problems with institute director Thomas Fink and science writer Ananyo Bhattacharya.
10. There is continuing new technical work rather than just recycling the 2020 claim. A December 2025 preprint by Dündar, Arsiwalla and Hatem Elshatlawy develops Wolfram Model multiway systems into explicit representations of quantum gates—including Hadamard, CNOT and π/8 gates—and quantum circuits. Dündar has conventional university affiliations in physics/engineering in Turkey in addition to involvement with the Wolfram Institute. It’s currently a preprint, so I would not put it in the same category as the Springer papers.
There is also a useful bibliometric clue. The important thing isn’t just that Wolfram/Gorard keep publishing papers themselves; newer papers are beginning to cite the framework in the context of other discrete-spacetime approaches. The 2025 European Physical Journal C example above is particularly useful because its reference list literally places Wolfram/Gorard among papers on network gravity, causal sets and discrete quantum gravity.
So where would I put Wolfram in August 2026?
I would use this scale:
Crackpot idea → outsider speculation → legitimate niche research program → serious competing quantum-gravity program → mainstream contender → established theory
The Wolfram Physics Project is now approximately here:
Crackpot → outsider → [LEGITIMATE NICHE RESEARCH PROGRAM] → serious contender → mainstream → established
In 2020, critics had a much easier case for saying: “Wolfram announced an enormous Theory-of-Everything claim outside the normal academic process, most physicists aren’t working on it, and almost everything supporting it comes from Wolfram’s own circle.”
That criticism is weaker six years later. There are now external peer-reviewed papers, independent citations in established theoretical-physics journals, conventional academic books incorporating the framework, major university physics/mathematics departments hosting detailed presentations, and outside academics actually building on pieces of the formalism.
Wolfram’s fundamental-physics claims remain highly speculative and far outside the consensus, but the Wolfram Model can no longer fairly be dismissed as merely internet crackpottery. It has generated peer-reviewed mathematical physics, attracted independent academic work and citations, and is receiving serious engagement at institutions such as Brown, Cambridge and King’s.
Another criticism of this book is that it seems to give Wolfram credit for a bunch of discoveries made by a huge array of people in math, CS, and areas like complexity, game theory, artificial life and AI, etc.
Why blame the book for giving the author credit, instead of the author for giving himself credit?
Admittedly the book did take on a life of its own, and he wrote it in Mathematica and built it with his own hand rolled CI/CD pipeline (FrameMaker + Wolfram Language diagrams + MIF export/import + automated build script + alpha/beta readers + DQA/SQA).
>At his request, I'd sent Steve Jobs a copy of the book—and I asked if he'd like to provide a quote. He responded that he thought I really shouldn't have quotes on the back of the book. "Isaac Newton didn't have quotes; nor should you."
>Another egregious weakness is biology. Wolfram displays absolutely no understanding of evolution, or what would be necessary to explain the adaptation of organisms to their environments. This is related to his peculiar views on methodology. If you want to get a rough grasp of how the leopard might get its spots, then building a CA model (or something similar) can be very illuminating. It will not tell you whether that's actually how it works. This is an important example, because there is a classic theory of biological pattern formation, or morphogenesis, first formulated by Turing in the 1950s, which lends itself very easily to modeling in CAs, and with a little fine-tuning produces things which look like animal coats, butterfly wings, etc., etc. The problem is that there is absolutely no reason to think that's how those patterns actually form; no one has identified even a single pair of Turing morphogens, despite decades of searching. [See "Update, 4 March 2012" below.] Indeed, the more the biologists unravel the actual mechanisms of morphogenesis, the more complicated and inelegant (but reliable) it looks. If, however, you think you have explained why leopards are spotted after coming up with a toy model that produces spots, it will not occur to you to ask why leopards have spots but polar bears do not, which is to say that you will simply be blind to the whole problem of biological adaptation.
The deranged Wolfram story I find most delightful is about the pains he took micromanaging the illustrations in his book, and how hard he is to work for. He required a photo of a leopard, to illustrate how its spots were similar to a reaction diffusion system. But he rejected the first leopard photo and demanded it be replaced by another, because he didn't like its facial expression.
I think it's charming how aesthetically picky he was about which cat pictures to use in his book. It's not enough for the science and mathematics behind the gigantic book to be ground breaking, revolutionary, earth shattering and astounding -- but also the leopard's smirk can't give readers the wrong impression.
>There were all sorts of unexpected challenges. I wanted an array of pictures of animals, to illustrate their range of pigmentation patterns. But so many of the pictures we could find (including ones I’d taken myself) we couldn’t use—because I considered the facial expressions of the animals just too distracting.
>Alan Turing was fascinated with morphogenesis, and wrote an article by the title "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis". He modeled cell growth as a reaction-diffusion systems, now known as Turing Patterns. And he was firmly against and intended to defeat the religious claptrap pseudoscience we now call "Intelligent Design". [...]
>I typed in the preface to "Morphogenesis: Collected Works of A.M. Turing", and scanned the drawing inside the front cover by Alan Turing's mother of her son watching the daisies grow:
And speaking of cellular automata, I'm also fascinated by the three levels of John von Neumann's universal constructors (mechanical, mathematical, quantum):
>Von Neumann had been interested in the applications of probability theory throughout his career; his work on the foundations of quantum mechanics and his theory of games are examples. When he became interested in automata, it was natural for him to apply probability theory here also. … His "Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components" is the first work on probabilistic automata … Whenever he discussed self-reproduction, he mentioned mutations … In Section 1.1.2.1 above and Section 1.8 below he posed the problems of modeling evolutionary processes in the framework of automata theory, of quantizing natural selection, and of explaining how highly efficient, complex, powerful automata can evolve from inefficient, simple, weak automata. A complete solution to these problems would give us a probabilistic model of self-reproduction and evolution. [9]
Burks, Arthur W., ed. Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, by John von Neumann.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966. Part I, p. 99, n. 9.
He advertises NKS as some sort of revolution, but I don't care about these claims either. What I do care is the clarity of his explanations and the quality of the book overall.
Stephen Wolfram isn't my idol. But I get a ton of value listening to him nonetheless. He's a genius and a rare one who can bridge the gap with the layman.
He also posts (and sometimes livestreams?) videos of some design discussion meetings at Wolfram "live CEOing", it's a rare glimpse at how he is in an "unpolished" form. From the few videos I sampled, he came off as pleasant and amiable.
[1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...
Twenty years later Wolfram ideas are still popular and showing that it is physicists that are reevaluating his theories
Ie Its LEGITIMATE NICHE RESEARCH PROGRAM not a crackpot by any means also his ideas are useful in the digital physics community
Some Evidence:
specifically evidence outside Wolfram’s own ecosystem, and the picture has changed since the Physics Project launched in 2020.
I think there is now enough peer-reviewed work, independent citation, and engagement by serious physics departments that dismissing it as merely “crackpot physics” is also hard to justify. It has become a legitimate, though still highly speculative and niche, research program.
Here are the strongest recent examples I found, roughly in order of evidential value:
1. Foundations of Physics, 2024 — an independent researcher explicitly develops the Wolfram Model. Furkan Semih Dündar of Amasya University published A Case Study for Leibnizian Ideas in Wolfram Model in Springer’s Foundations of Physics. This matters because it is not a Wolfram blog post: it went through a conventional academic journal and explicitly treats the Wolfram Model as something worth investigating. The paper is cautious—it calls some interpretations speculative—which actually makes it better evidence of genuine academic engagement rather than promotion.
2. International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 2024 — substantial mathematical development of the framework. Xerxes Arsiwalla and Jonathan Gorard published Pregeometric Spaces from Wolfram Model Rewriting Systems as Homotopy Types in Springer’s International Journal of Theoretical Physics. They connect Wolfram rewriting systems to homotopy type theory, higher categories and approaches to quantum gravity. This isn’t independent in the same sense—both authors have strong connections to the project—but it means the mathematics is getting through normal peer review and entering the conventional theoretical-physics literature. A copy is also deposited in Cambridge University’s research repository.
3. European Physical Journal C, 2025 — perhaps the most interesting independent signal. A 2025 theoretical-physics paper by Ali Chamseddine, Ola Malaeb and Sara Najem on discrete gravity cites both Gorard’s Wolfram Model work and Wolfram’s original Physics Project paper directly in its survey of approaches to discrete/network geometry. More importantly, look at the intellectual company it keeps in the references: causal sets, quantum graphity, Regge calculus, causal dynamical triangulations, Carlo Rovelli and spin foams, and other established discrete-gravity programs.
Especially with the failure of string theories -We see many physicists treating the Wolfram Model as one of the approaches in the literature that needs to be cited when discussing emergent/discrete spacetime.
4. A serious academic quantum-gravity book now places Wolfram’s ideas alongside established researchers. Routledge published Quantum Gravity and Computation: Information, Pregeometry, and Digital Physics in late 2025/copyright 2026. Stephen Wolfram contributes the chapter On the Nature of Time, and there is a separate chapter called Ruliology: Linking Computation, Observers and Physical Law. The volume also includes work by established researchers including Paul Davies, Gerard Milburn, Vlatko Vedral, Chiara Marletto, Daniele Oriti and Renate Loll.
I would put quite a bit of weight on this. It doesn’t imply that Vedral, Loll, Oriti, etc. endorse the Ruliad. But it does show that computational/pregeometric ideas associated with Wolfram are now participating in an academic conversation with researchers from established quantum-information and quantum-gravity programs.
5. Brown University’s Physics Department gave Wolfram a dedicated two-hour physics colloquium in May 2025. The title was Computation All the Way Down: The Machine Code of Physics & Other Applications. This wasn’t a tech entrepreneurship event; it was hosted by Brown’s Department of Physics and listed as a physics colloquium.
Again, universities invite controversial people all the time, so an invitation isn’t endorsement. But major physics departments generally don’t give two-hour research colloquia to completely unserious theories.
6. Cambridge’s 2025–26 Maxwell Lecture went to Wolfram. The Cambridge University Physics Society selected him for its Maxwell Lecture, whose Cambridge listing explicitly describes the lecture as dedicated to “ground-breaking theoretical & computational physics research and discoveries.” His subject was Computation at the Foundations of Everything — Physics and More, including his recent foundational-physics work. It was run in partnership with the Cambridge Mathematical Society.
This is one of the cleaner institutional-respectability signals.
7. King’s College London went considerably further in October 2025. King’s Department of Mathematics and King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence jointly hosted Wolfram before a packed audience of students and staff. More interestingly, Nikolay Gromov, a Professor of Theoretical Physics, explicitly discussed the research Wolfram presented, including the work with Jonathan Gorard, and described it as “fascinating and inspiring.”
The King’s headline itself is revealing: “King’s explores new scientific paradigm with creator of Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram.” That’s not acceptance of the theory, but it is a mainstream university treating the program as intellectually serious.
8. Brian Greene / World Science Festival devoted more than two hours to the actual physics in 2025. Wolfram sat down with Columbia physicist Brian Greene specifically to examine whether space, time, general relativity and quantum mechanics can emerge computationally. This wasn’t a five-minute publicity segment. The World Science Festival page currently shows roughly 239,000 views, 4,200+ likes and 800+ comments, so it is also actual evidence of growing public/scientific interest.
This is much weaker evidence for scientific acceptance than the papers above, but quite strong evidence for increased visibility among scientifically literate audiences.
9. The London Institute for Mathematical Sciences hosted him specifically to discuss foundational physics in October 2025. LIMS describes Wolfram as a theoretical physicist and calls his work a “radical new framework for fundamental physics.” The event was a discussion of foundational problems with institute director Thomas Fink and science writer Ananyo Bhattacharya.
10. There is continuing new technical work rather than just recycling the 2020 claim. A December 2025 preprint by Dündar, Arsiwalla and Hatem Elshatlawy develops Wolfram Model multiway systems into explicit representations of quantum gates—including Hadamard, CNOT and π/8 gates—and quantum circuits. Dündar has conventional university affiliations in physics/engineering in Turkey in addition to involvement with the Wolfram Institute. It’s currently a preprint, so I would not put it in the same category as the Springer papers.
There is also a useful bibliometric clue. The important thing isn’t just that Wolfram/Gorard keep publishing papers themselves; newer papers are beginning to cite the framework in the context of other discrete-spacetime approaches. The 2025 European Physical Journal C example above is particularly useful because its reference list literally places Wolfram/Gorard among papers on network gravity, causal sets and discrete quantum gravity.
So where would I put Wolfram in August 2026?
I would use this scale:
Crackpot idea → outsider speculation → legitimate niche research program → serious competing quantum-gravity program → mainstream contender → established theory
The Wolfram Physics Project is now approximately here:
Crackpot → outsider → [LEGITIMATE NICHE RESEARCH PROGRAM] → serious contender → mainstream → established
In 2020, critics had a much easier case for saying: “Wolfram announced an enormous Theory-of-Everything claim outside the normal academic process, most physicists aren’t working on it, and almost everything supporting it comes from Wolfram’s own circle.”
That criticism is weaker six years later. There are now external peer-reviewed papers, independent citations in established theoretical-physics journals, conventional academic books incorporating the framework, major university physics/mathematics departments hosting detailed presentations, and outside academics actually building on pieces of the formalism.
Wolfram’s fundamental-physics claims remain highly speculative and far outside the consensus, but the Wolfram Model can no longer fairly be dismissed as merely internet crackpottery. It has generated peer-reviewed mathematical physics, attracted independent academic work and citations, and is receiving serious engagement at institutions such as Brown, Cambridge and King’s.
Admittedly the book did take on a life of its own, and he wrote it in Mathematica and built it with his own hand rolled CI/CD pipeline (FrameMaker + Wolfram Language diagrams + MIF export/import + automated build script + alpha/beta readers + DQA/SQA).
The Making of A New Kind of Science:
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2022/05/the-making-of-a-...
>At his request, I'd sent Steve Jobs a copy of the book—and I asked if he'd like to provide a quote. He responded that he thought I really shouldn't have quotes on the back of the book. "Isaac Newton didn't have quotes; nor should you."
A New Kind of Necronomicron
https://horrorcultfilms.co.uk/2014/11/hcf-exclusive-intervie...
The deranged Wolfram story I find most delightful is about the pains he took micromanaging the illustrations in his book, and how hard he is to work for. He required a photo of a leopard, to illustrate how its spots were similar to a reaction diffusion system. But he rejected the first leopard photo and demanded it be replaced by another, because he didn't like its facial expression.
I think it's charming how aesthetically picky he was about which cat pictures to use in his book. It's not enough for the science and mathematics behind the gigantic book to be ground breaking, revolutionary, earth shattering and astounding -- but also the leopard's smirk can't give readers the wrong impression.
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2022/05/the-making-of-a-...
>There were all sorts of unexpected challenges. I wanted an array of pictures of animals, to illustrate their range of pigmentation patterns. But so many of the pictures we could find (including ones I’d taken myself) we couldn’t use—because I considered the facial expressions of the animals just too distracting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AnimalsBeingFunny/comments/165cmq1/...
Speaking of Turing's "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42519371
>Alan Turing was fascinated with morphogenesis, and wrote an article by the title "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis". He modeled cell growth as a reaction-diffusion systems, now known as Turing Patterns. And he was firmly against and intended to defeat the religious claptrap pseudoscience we now call "Intelligent Design". [...]
>I typed in the preface to "Morphogenesis: Collected Works of A.M. Turing", and scanned the drawing inside the front cover by Alan Turing's mother of her son watching the daisies grow:
http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/Turing/Morphogenesis.txt
http://donhopkins.com/home/AlanTuringHockeyOrWatchingTheDais...
>[...]
And speaking of cellular automata, I'm also fascinated by the three levels of John von Neumann's universal constructors (mechanical, mathematical, quantum):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304084
>Von Neumann had been interested in the applications of probability theory throughout his career; his work on the foundations of quantum mechanics and his theory of games are examples. When he became interested in automata, it was natural for him to apply probability theory here also. … His "Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components" is the first work on probabilistic automata … Whenever he discussed self-reproduction, he mentioned mutations … In Section 1.1.2.1 above and Section 1.8 below he posed the problems of modeling evolutionary processes in the framework of automata theory, of quantizing natural selection, and of explaining how highly efficient, complex, powerful automata can evolve from inefficient, simple, weak automata. A complete solution to these problems would give us a probabilistic model of self-reproduction and evolution. [9]
Burks, Arthur W., ed. Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, by John von Neumann. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966. Part I, p. 99, n. 9.
https://archive.org/details/theoryofselfrepr00vonn_0/page/n9...