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What is a beautiful concept or idea that continues to blow your mind? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

160 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.

Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either "alive" or "dead". Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.

For example, if a cell is "alive" but has less than 2 "alive" neighbors it "dies" by under-population. If the cell is "alive" and has more than three "alive" neighbors it "dies" from over-population, etc.

Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.

It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles... life.

There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you trace back the cosmological evolution of our universe you'd get a "singularity", that is not the same thing as being a single particle. Even the physical existence of a singular point at the beginning is not accurate. A singularity in physics is a mathematical artefact signaling the breakdown of the descriptive power of the theory you are using. The common example is the singular behaviour of the electric field around a charged particle in classical electrodynamics, the singularity is a signal that you'd need to switch to quantum electrodynamics to describe the physics close to a charged particle. Similarly with cosmology: close to the beginning we have a singularity that signals the breakdown of the descriptive power of our theories, and we need to switch. What we would switch to we call a " quantum gravity theory", but we are not yet sure what that theory is.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see what you mean, but if this is possible, then I don’t see why not the entire universe as a whole near T≈0.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you don't see why it's impossible, then you don't understand it. You can't just lump together all the "quantum" ideas because they sound cool.

Notice that the particles in your article were "super-chilled". That's the exact opposite of the early universe.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

So you’re saying it’s absolutely, 100% impossible that the universe in its entirety was/is in superposition at any one point?