I mean, Mathematica is a truly great, great piece of software, but his "New Kind of Science" was both utterly worthless and a fantastic treatise on how a person's grandiose religion of self leads to utter delusion.
I started to read it when I college, and read hundreds of pages into it before I started to realize that there was nothing there. The entire book can be summed up as "complexity arises from multiple iterations on simplicity" and, like, you can teach that to a middle schooler in a day, no need for a thousands of pages-long tome.