cellular automata

[sam at zeppomusic.com]

True. Then again, 'why' is one of the most profane
cuss-words imaginable for any self-respecting
scientist. Theirs is not to judge but to analyse and
deduce. As a mathematician, Wolfram is under no
obligation to 'explain' himself, but note that
explaining oneself is not the same as proposing
practical applications of one's 'revolutionary
discoveries'. The latter is essential in raising the
book's postulates above the level of intellectual
curiosities.

An important point is that Wolfram's book is
categorically not the final nail in the coffin of the
collective human ego, nor the death knell for the
eleventh-hour hope that the reason we are here is
anything other than aleatory happenstance / powers
completely beyond our control, nor the guillotining of
free will...

Because all that happened a century and a half ago when
evolutionary theory was presented to the world and a
chain of discoveries began which would result in the
realisation that we are absolutely nothing more than,
well, hydrocarbon automata designed to transport long
protein strings through time.

I haven't finished NKoS yet, but I've already
experienced some pretty dizzying epiphanies which are
enough to convince me that, even if Stevie D. doesn't
have the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything,
he's definitely 'hot' as opposed to 'cold.' Know what I
mean?

On Tue, 23 July 2002, "David Morris" wrote:

> 
> 
> >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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