> which led to Stephen Wolfram's success etc etc.

Wolfram's A New Kind of Science takes the idea a bit too far, in my opinion. It's an exposition of the hypothesis that the underlying stratum of life and the universe is, like cellular automatons, discrete—and therefore can be understood in terms of discrete processes, which he views as analogous to real life. He points to emergence in cellular automatons as evidence that an analogous emergent phenomenon was the reason biological life came into existence.

Mathematically and philosophically, it's a very interesting idea, but I'd hope that at this stage in scientific history, we'd understand that step 2 to validating an interesting hypothesis is testing it.