I and my assistants spent literally years producing all the diagrams in the book. But when I first actually saw it, there was one particular feature that got me really excited: it was easy to take any picture, and zoom in on it!
And, now, nearly a decade later, all that effort has paid off wonderfully in letting us build a version of A New Kind of Science for the iPad.Īt the beginning I wasn’t sure what the experience of reading A New Kind of Science on an iPad would be like. But when we originally produced A New Kind of Science, we did it very carefully, with good clean software engineering. Still, A New Kind of Science is a huge and complex book, and it was far from obvious that it could be delivered in a good way on the iPad without an unbelievable amount of work. But the iPad was a completely different story. And every time a new ebook reader had come out, I’d look to see if it could support a good version of the book. We’d had a basic version of A New Kind of Science on the web since 2003. When the iPad came out in April, I was involved in launching the Touch Press ebook publishing company. And from that time to this, that 5.5 lb (2.5 kg) lump of paper has been the definitive representation of my decade-plus of intellectual work.īut today I’m excited to be able to say that there’s something new and in some ways even better: a full version on the iPad. But in the end we got many compliments on the object we produced. The actual print production process was quite an adventure-going right to the edge of what was possible. And back in 2002 when A New Kind of Science was published, the only real possibility was to print a book on paper, using the very best printing technology of the time.
But then came the question of how to actually deliver everything. On the software side, the biggest part was using Mathematica to create elaborate algorithmic diagrams-thousands of them. It took a lot of technology to do that presentation. But another part was spent figuring out how to present the science in the best possible way-using words and pictures. Most of that time was devoted to discovering the science in the book.
I spent a decade of my life writing A New Kind of Science.
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