As regular readers here know, I'm a big Stephen Wolfram fan.

Wolfram is a genius. His ideas for using the real power of computing for science are first-rate. His Mathematica program is a vital tool. He has succeeded as both a scientist and entrepreneur, a trick I've only seen pulled off one other time, by architect-developer John Portman.

But just as Portman eventually over-reached, with his One Peachtree Center (right), so has Wolfram, I'm afraid, now that I've gotten his A New Kind of Science.

NOTE: For those who don't remember, Portman had to hock everything to build his One Peachtree masterpiece. Tom Wolfe fictionalized it but as with Citizen Kane the truth may have been even a bit better.

Wolfram's problem was he didn't hire a ghost writer. His book is brilliant, but it's terribly overwritten. He doesn't know how to put a period at the end of a sentence. He writes on a college level where high school would do.

And that's a shame, because this is really some brilliant conceptualizing, as I've stated before. Wolfram found that simple patterns, repeated at length, can result in enormous complexity.

Complexity emerges from simplicity. Wow.

This has enormous implications in every area of science. For instance. DNA consists mainly of four bases -- adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine. You can map all the DNA you want, but something's missing, some underlying structure that goes beyond the order in which the bases cover the field. There seems, for instance, to be very little difference between the DNA of human beings and the DNA of much simpler animals. Something is going on we can't fathom.

Well, here's a way to fathom it. The patterns are simple, but the results are complex. It's a job for cellular automata.

There are many other aspects of our world we can't understand, and Wolfram's work offers us a way to see it.

But we won't see it if we have to slog through a five-pound tome like A New Kind of Science.

What we need is Wolfram for Dummies.