My impression is that Wolfram came to such conclusions because he is obsessed with cellular automata and with their mathematical universality in discrete domain

My impression is that Wolfram came to such conclusions because he is obsessed with cellular automata and with their mathematical universality in discrete domains. Of course, they are useless in continuous domains, so it would be ruinous to his world-view if the universe were continuous. So it's a bit like ancient metaphysics a la Plato and Co., where the properties of the universe are inferred from first principles (which come from... where, exactly?) rather than from any empirical observation. A review of Wolfram's book: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...