Among a small group of very smart people, the publication of "A New Kind of Science," by Stephen Wolfram, has been anticipated with the anxiety aroused in literary circles by, say, Jonathan Franzen's recent novel, "The Corrections." For more than a decade, Wolfram, a theoretical physicist turned millionaire software entrepreneur, has been laboring in solitude on a work that, he has promised, will change the way we see the world.

Now, weighing in at 1,263 pages (counting a long, unpaginated index) and 583,313 words, the book could hardly be more intimidating. But that is the price one pays for a first-class intellectual thrill.

... From the very beginning of this meticulously constructed manifesto, the reader is presented with a stunning proposal: all the science we know will be demolished and reassembled. An ancient error will be corrected, one so profoundly misguided that it has led science down the wrong avenue, until it is approaching a cul-de-sac.