"All processes, whether they are produced by human effort or occur spontaneously in nature, can be viewed as computations," maintains British-born scientist Stephen Wolfram in his 2002 A New Kind of Science. And Wolfram means everything, from biological evolution to free will to the activities of extraterrestrials. His book, the outcome of many years of research on a type of computer program known as cellular automata, has become something of a grail text to many, an explanation of a complex universe that has grown out of simplicity. For others it is a bit of hyped-up showmanship, and for still others it presents a challenge to the very foundations of traditional science. The creator of the highly successful computer software program Mathematica, a researcher whose work in cellular automata in the 1980s caused a stir in the scientific community, Wolfram is the sort of gadfly scientific personality to earn descriptives...