cellular automata

[David Morris]

>From: RuudSaurins at aol.com
>      At the risk of sounding like I have gone postally epistemological; 
>Wolfram's book is an outstanding catalog of fascinating observations that 
>reveals to the reader that much of the "natural world" can be "derived" 
>from elemental paradigms that can be consistently identified and given 
>mathematical designations....call them cellular automata or what have you.
>      In the grand scheme of things, however; it is my impression (_not!_ 
>criticism) that this only serves us with a more all-encompassing catalog of 
>the "what?" of the natural world, with some clever insight into the 
>possible "how?", but no new clues to "why?".

>From the "In the Beginning" article on the NYTime's web site:

In 1979, Dr. Alan Guth, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
realized that a hypothesized glitch in this process would have had drastic 
consequences for the universe. Under some circumstances, a glass of water 
can stay liquid as the temperature falls below 32 degrees, until it is 
disturbed, at which point it will rapidly freeze, releasing latent heat in 
the process. Similarly, the universe could "supercool" and stay in a unified 
state too long. In that case, space itself would become temporarily imbued 
with a mysterious kind of latent heat, or energy.

Inserted into Einstein's equations, the latent energy would act as a kind of 
antigravity, and the universe would blow itself apart, Dr. Guth discovered 
in a calculation in 1979.

In far less than the blink of an eye, 10-37 second, a speck much smaller 
than a proton would have swollen to the size of a grapefruit and then 
resumed its more stately expansion, with all of normal cosmic history before 
it, resulting in today's observable universe — a patch of sky and stars 14 
billion light-years across. All, by the magical-seeming logic of Einstein's 
equations, from about an ounce of primordial stuff.

"The universe," Dr. Guth liked to say, "might be the ultimate free lunch."


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