What is a beautiful concept or idea that continues to blow your mind?

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!

MostlyLazy,

Galaxies are not evenly distributed in space. Instead, when you look at the universe, galaxies are grouped in giant strings that look like a neural connections in a brain.

niktemadur,
@niktemadur@kbin.social avatar

And here's the other thing I try to visualize:
Matter - both dark and "normal" - falling like water into these gravitational canyons that we see as giant strings, while the empty spaces in between expand and accelerate. The dynamics of this thing are mind-breaking.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

Yea because gra-- woahhh

OceanSoap,

It blew my mind when I learned that we’re in a relatively dark, empty part of space compared to what’s out there. It really put into perspective for me how difficult space travel will be for us as we continue to advance.

yunggwailo,
@yunggwailo@kbin.social avatar

Space is incomprehensibly big and its getting larger over time. We will never have meaningful travel outside the solar system. If humanity started traveling in space from the moment we evolved, we would be able to travel the length of the milky way around two times. Space is basically a boondoggle. Our solar system still contains lots of resources though, so its not totally worthless.

maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yea … like Star Trek, with warp speed and everything, is basically all limited to our single Galaxy … and that’s not unrealistic given their technology.

Like in that space-faring future, the galaxy is basically the new continent and the inter-galactic divide the new great ocean that no one has ever crossed.

TitanLaGrange,

Tom Paris and the Cochrane have entered the chat

lorax,
@lorax@lemmy.ca avatar

Symbiosis in nature….it always brings up feelings of awe and wonder for me. Especially in forests. The “wood-wide web” or “mycorrhizal network” being my latest obsession . The fact that the fungi joins the trees together through the roots to allow for exchange of nutrients, water, and chemical signals between plants. And then there’s the forest canopy, and the role it plays in keeping the forest healthy.

Trees are awesome.

szczur,

Anarchism based on mutual respect and aid. It’s truly beautiful.

fearout,
@fearout@kbin.social avatar

The concept of emergence blows my mind.

We have this property in our universe where simple things with simple rules can create infinitely complex things and behaviours. A molecule of water can’t be wet, but water can. A single ant can’t really do anything by himself, but a colony with simple pheromone exchange mechanisms can assign jobs, regulate population, create huge anthills with vents, specialty rooms and highways.

Nothing within a cell is "alive", it’s just atoms and molecules, but the cell itself is. One cell cannot experience things, think, love, have hopes and dreams, or want to watch Netflix all day, but a human can.

The fact that lots of tiny useless things governed by really simple rules can create this complexity in this world is breathtakingly beautiful.

Kinda ties into your example :)

kenbw2,

Reminds me of the statement that you can’t dissect a rabbit to find out why it’s cute

vera,

Won’t stop me from trying [joking]

OceanSoap,

Don’t, rabbit necropsies are the worst smelling thing you’ll ever encounter.

speck,

How come? Why rabbits specifically?

OceanSoap,

Not sure why, just that I was in a building when one was being performed and it stunk up the whole place to the point I almost went home because I was going to vomit. My boss put out a bowl of liquid that neutralized the odor, thank god.

wtfeweguys,

Ok what was the liquid? That sounds useful.

acannan,

Just like the trillions of parameters that make up machine learning models that can speak or create images

fearout,
@fearout@kbin.social avatar

Definitely :)

pyrrhus,

Indeed , more is different:

…engr.tamu.edu/…/anderson72more_is_different.pdf

DRUMS_,

Alan Watts contextualizes our daily lives as the outer, “fine spray” at the edge of the big bang --still exploding. Planets “people-ing” and your daily schedule, relationships, accuisition of goods, etc. is just the complex late stage of the big bang explosion. The explosion is chaos but as time goes by order slips in and creates “complexity”. This is all still an explosion.

Davel23,

You might want to check out the novel Bloom by Wil McCarthy. It uses Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata to illustrate several plot points.

aCosmicWave,

Thank you! This is right up my alley and I will definitely check it out.

Djh8878,

What are some other rules to the excel example you gave, kinda want to try programming something like this to see how it’d play out

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Just look up “The Game of Life.” It’s not really a spread sheet, that’s simply how it’s displayed (grids of pixels that are either living, dead, or food) and it just kinda simulates an ecosystem in the most very, very basic of ways. All you can do to influence the game is change what a grid contains, with the goal (if you can say it has any) of keeping a sustainable system going.

aCosmicWave,

Yep! The spreadsheet is just an analogy I used to help unfamiliar people visualize what I was talking about.

The actual rules for Conway’s Game of Life are as follows:

  1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
  2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
  3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
  4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction
aussiematt,

It would have to be Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Such a beautiful proof that shakes mathematics to its core.

The science communicator Veritasium made a nice video about it: https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo

I first learned about it in Douglas Hofstaedter’s masterpiece Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

prole,

Second the Gödel Escher Bach recommendation. Don’t really hear about that one these days.

luthis, (edited )

Bergsons theory of mind. I wish i understood it enough to put a tldr, but its complex and has been misunderstood.

Heres another one. Michael behe’s mousetrap. He likens cellular structure as a mousetrap, with every piece forming a necesesary part, and without any one part it ceases to function.

Back when i was a creationist christian and didnt accept evolution as fact, he was a hero. Endogenous retroviral dna put that all to rest. Except maybe not.

The counter arguments were that other structures could form over time to create the minimalist structures we see today, like using scaffolding to construct a self sustaining roman bridge or replacing the wooden base of the mousetrap with the floor. Obviously behe is mistaken.

But he claims not, that he doesnt argue that variants of mousetraps can’t exist. He argues that all exist without scaffolding. We dont see cellular structures with unnecessary parts that can be acted upon by evolution. Everything already is the end product after evolution has selected away the unnecessary parts. So how can evolution be happening the way its described? We just go between different end products. Theres no structures still with scaffolding.

This keeps me up at night. Maybe theres more to evolution that we dont know yet.

001100010010,
@001100010010@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

The butterfly effect. The phenomeon that tiny seemingly insignificant changes can result in massively different outcomes. Someone out there could read this post and get distracted and leave home for work/school/shopping a bit later than they would’ve and avoid a major accident. But conversely, someone could also get distracted by this post while crossing the road and… you know… die…

Fascinating, yet terrifying at the same time.

Strae,

I think the butterfly effect is much more interesting when you think about incredibly far reaching effects that are essentially impossible to predict. Someone running late and getting into an accident might actually be relatively easy to predict.

Instead: someone reading this post is running late. Because of this a different car following behind them gets caught at a red light they shouldn’t have gotten caught at. As they hit the brakes for that light, their passenger lurches forward and accidentally sends a nonsensical text to their friend. Their friend reads that nonsense text, and in their confusion spills their coffee on the floor. A person walking by slips on the coffee, hits their head, and dies.

The person running late just killed a person miles away, and they have zero idea that it even happened.

5in1k,

You can design and order custom genes online to make e-coli do different things.

substill,

Thermoses. They keep hot stuff hot. They keep cold stuff cold. No touchscreen or controls whatsoever. How does it know?

dmention7,

On the chance you’re not just making a funny - The walls of your house keep inside stuff inside and outside stuff outside. A thermos is just a wall for heat, whether that heat is trying to get in or out.

stinkypoopsalot,

Are you saying I live in a thermos?

Saigonauticon,

I suppose you could model the Earth as a thermos, or some type of vacuum flask.

Saigonauticon,

The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester, specifically (en.wikipedia.org/…/Elitzur–Vaidman_bomb_tester).

Next, that I can buy and program a computer for 0.30 USD that’s half the size of a grain of rice (ATtiny10). There are cheaper too, but that’s the one I like.

Finally, on to the horrifying: Boltzmann brains. The idea that given a reasonable interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics, and long spans of time, the most common form of brain in the universe ought to be one that forms due to random fluctuations. It exists for long enough to have exactly one thought (e.g. recall a false memory), then dissipates.

This ought to be by far the most common form of conscious mind in the Universe. In a sense, you could say it ‘blows’ the general case of minds.

Since you are a mind, statistically, you ought to be a Boltzmann brain. You may not be, but are unable to prove otherwise, even to yourself. So either we have some things left to learn about thermodynamics, or the most probable outcome at all times is that you cease to exist immediately after having your current thought (although I hope you don’t). Sleep tight!

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

Evolution as a concept; not just biological. The fact that you can explain the rise of complex systems with just three things - inheritance, mutation, selection. It’s so simple, yet so powerful.

Perhaps not surprisingly it’s directly tied to what OP is talking about cellular automata.

dipbeneaththelasers,

There's something interesting in here about the persistence of legacy systems that I can't quite put my finger on. Rest assured I will be consumed by the thought for the remainder of the day.

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

There are plenty things that we could talk about legacy systems from an evolutionary approach. It’s specially fun when you notice similarities between software and other (yup!) evolutionary systems.

For example. In Biology you’ll often see messy biological genetic pools, full of clearly sub-optimal alleles for a given environment, decreasing in frequency over time but never fully disappearing. They’re a lot like machines running Windows XP in 2023, it’s just that the selective pressure towards more modern Windows versions was never harsh enough to get rid of them completely.

Or leftovers in languages that work, but they don’t make synchronic sense when you look at other features of the language. Stuff like gender/case in English pronouns, Portuguese proclisis (SOV leftover from Latin in a SVO language), or Italian irregular plurals (leftovers of Latin defunct neuter gender). It’s like modern sites that still need animated .GIF support, even if .WEBM would be more consistent with the modern internet.

treadful,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

DNA still blows my mind. Some weird simple molecules that just happen to like to link together have become the encoding of how complex biological systems are constructed. Then mash two separate sets of DNA together, add a little happenstance, and you have another new being from those three things you mentioned.

weirdwallace75,

Noether's Theorem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/noether.html

Fundamentally, it allows us to logically infer the conservation laws from the laws of motion of a given physical system using relatively simple math. It always applies, no matter if we're talking about massive systems or quantum ones.

pyrrhus,

I think the concept is even more beautiful than you described:

A symmetry in a physical system implies a conservation law.

As a physicist, since the beginning of your studies you learn to appreciate and seek symmetries in various systems. At first, it’s mostly on an intuitive way to help you understand or simplify a problem. But at some point you learn about Noether’s theorem and see the even deeper meaning and power of symmetries.

For example, symmetry in movement in space (meaning I can move my entire system and it stays the same) implies conservation of momentum.

And symmetry in time translation (meaning if move the entire system a through a same interval in time and it still behaves the same way) implies conservation of energy.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • asklemmy@lemmy.ml
  • localhost
  • All magazines
    •
    Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #