Did This Man Just Rewrite Science? "The idea that complex things can arise from simple ones is as old as Euclid, who built a whole geometry out of a few axioms and logic, but the giant on whose shoulders Dr. Wolfram is most securely standing is the English mathematician Alan Turing. In 1936, Mr. Turing and Dr. Alonzo Church, a Princeton mathematician, showed that in principle any mathematical or logical problem that could be solved by a person could be solved by a so-called Turing machine. As envisioned by Mr. Turing, it was like the head of a modern tape recorder that would move back and forth along an endless tape reading symbols inscribed on it and writing new ones. Moreover, a so-called universal Turing machine could emulate any other conceivable computer. ... From that point on, Windows 95 and the Internet were only matters of time and transistor technology." Uh, sure...