For a long time, I had thought that A New Kind of Science is an excellent math popularization book on cellular automata, prompting to do computational experimen

For a long time, I had thought that A New Kind of Science is an excellent math popularization book on cellular automata, prompting to do computational experiments in mathematics, and having an emphasis on beautiful visualizations. Also, his science education posts (e.g. on analyzing FB data) are wonderful. I just read a few chapters. And later, I was surprised by the criticism. It turned out that "A New Kind of Science" is not a tongue-in-cheek title (vide "Freakonomics"), but that SW actually believes that it not only is a new kind of science, but his science (Turning, Conway, Feynman, anyone...?). Some cellular automata simulations are nice. And in general, many concrete in physics are not general, yet are useful e.g. for numerics (with known limitations). They are not considered crackpot (even if not useful), as long as they make clear what they predict, what - not. Any toy model usurping its right to be the TOE, without a sufficient proof (not just the lack of proof it is not) is likely to be crackpotism. (Side note: for quite a few years I used heavily Mathematica. Only a decade ago I switched to Python, for a few reasons, but mostly for open-source (and quite a few of its implications). Jupyter Notebook, which IMHO was a game-changer for data science in Python, clearly had quite a few inspirations from Mathematica.)