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!

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.

Rick512,

The scale of the universe. It’s an incomprehensible amount of emptiness.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

Highly recommend the browser game Orbity.io

Cl1nk,

I just played it, such a fun game. Not exactly what I thought it was going to be when it come to the infinity of space

yunggwailo,
@yunggwailo@kbin.social avatar

It honestly pisses me off lol. I was so into space as a youngin but as Ive gotten a better grasp of the scale and what is actually possible in physics Ive realized its a massive boondoggle. Real pretty though

abbadon420,

I still refuse to believe that we can’t overcome the limit of the speed of light. Maybe it’s something like “warpspeed”, maybe it’s something like evolving beyond the need for a physical body, but I believe that at some (far) point in our future we will solve that problem.

yunggwailo,
@yunggwailo@kbin.social avatar

Speed of light is a bit of a misnomer, its really the speed of causality; the least amount of time it can take for one thing to interact with another. It will never be possible to overcome that limit unfortunately

Telodzrum,

Nah, it’s impossible with our current understanding of the nature of the universe and it’s rules. Every time that has been true of something, humanity has eventually either solved the problem or rendered it moot. This one may just take a while.

yunggwailo,
@yunggwailo@kbin.social avatar

Respectfully disagree. The math speaks for itself

Telodzrum,

How shortsighted.

AmbientChaos,

You should look into the effects on causality of going faster than the speed of light. If you can send information faster than the speed of light all kinds of wacky paradoxes show their heads. I used to believe what you did, that with time and knowledge we could overcome the speed of light. But after learning more about our universe I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I enjoyed this video on the topic youtu.be/an0M-wcHw5A

yunggwailo,
@yunggwailo@kbin.social avatar

Its shortsighted to trust math?

tatterdemalion,
@tatterdemalion@programming.dev avatar

A fact I’ve recently enjoyed spreading around: all of humanity’s radio communications have traveled about 200 light years from Earth. The diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is ~100K light years. So (in the worst case) we’re like 0.2% of the way to even being a “blip on the radar” of any alien life within our galaxy.

TitanLaGrange,

all of humanity’s radio communications have traveled about 200 light years from Earth

Also interesting is that because the energy of those signals is spreading out as they move away from their point of origin they become less detectable as they travel. Most signals would fall below practical detection limits before making it halfway to the nearest star. At the extreme, the Arecibo Message, transmitted with a ridiculous ERP, will be detectable to reasonably sized receivers for tens of thousands of light years, assuming they are located along the path of the beam.

spclagntdanazoe,

Frequency hopping. It’s like hiding messages in music. Always loved that idea.

Cl1nk,

Can you explain this concept like I’m 5?i searched on YouTube but the videos look extremely technical

treadful,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

Frequency hopping as I understand it, is just multiple transceivers agreeing to cycle through different previously agreed upon frequencies to communicate. I don’t get the music analogy.

spclagntdanazoe,

So if you consider that different notes of music are different frequencies of sound, each radio frequency “hopped to” would be a different note on a piano being played on either end of the signal.

From Wikipedia: “Antheil and Lamarr developed the idea of using frequency hopping: in this case using a player piano roll to randomly change the signal sent between the control center and torpedo at short bursts within a range of 88 frequencies on the spectrum (88 black and white keys are on a piano keyboard). The specific code for the sequence of frequencies would be held identically by the controlling ship and in the torpedo. This basically encrypted the signal, as it was impossible for the enemy to scan and jam all 88 frequencies because this would have required too much power. Antheil would control the frequency-hopping sequence using a player-piano mechanism, which he had earlier used to score his Ballet Mécanique.”

nekat_emanresu,

aaaand there is the missing part of my understanding about jamming and frequency hopping radios! Thanks

skillissuer,

thermodynamics. it sets hard physical boundary to what happens spontaneously and what can’t, how much energy you need to pump in or can recover from process, but not only that - it’s very broadly applicable, including large parts of chemistry, biology, information theory and more, like this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system

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

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.

fiat_lux,

People working together to solve problems without personal profit as the main incentive.

Djangofett,

Open source software

fiat_lux,

Dear God, it's beautiful. (And genuinely seriously important)

KoboldCoterie,
@KoboldCoterie@pawb.social avatar

It kills me how much more of it there’d be, and how much better off we’d be in general, if we weren’t forced to spend so much of our lives working for other people.

speck,

Now we're at a top 3 idea which haunts me. We have everything to make life so amazing now, but we just can't let go of these defunct paradigms that drag us down into a lower common denominator existence.

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

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.

voodooattack,

The incessant idea that I get when I read about quantum physics: with no observers and nothing to interact with/measure it, was the universe itself in superposition during the Big Bang? If so, did the wave function even collapse or are we just one of the possible outcomes inside of it?

niktemadur, (edited )
@niktemadur@kbin.social avatar

did the wave function even collapse or are we just one of the possible outcomes inside of it?

If you are asking the question, wouldn't you be observing it, therefore the wave function most certainly did collapse?

I'm hearing the echo of Descartes in there. I think, therefore I am.
EDIT: "I ask, therefore I have observed, therefore the Universe is".

voodooattack,

That’s the wrong interpretation of “observing”. Observation is the act of measuring the properties of an object/particle by “interacting” with it. Basically if something is not being observed (I.e completely isolated) it enters superposition until such a time that it’s measured/interacted with again. Observation has nothing to do with consciousness imo, just connection to causality in the universe at large.

Cl1nk,

We are in a simulation 😉

KevonLooney,

An observer is not required for something to exist. You are misunderstanding. In quantum physics observers affect the thing they observe. That’s it.

voodooattack,

Never said anything about it not existing. From what I understood, a particle that’s not interacting with an outside force stays in superposition by default. The universe was supposedly a single particle at the moment of the Big Bang, thus it stands to reason that it would have been in superposition if it couldn’t interact with anything else.

mumblerfish,

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.

voodooattack,

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.

KevonLooney,

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.

voodooattack,

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

Grimlo9ic,
@Grimlo9ic@kbin.social avatar

Part of the beauty and awe I get whenever I reread that famous excerpt from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot is the sense of how ephemeral and delicate our existence, and even the very human concept of "existence", is. We are infinitesimally small and yet, through no fault of our own, our days, how we fill them, and the people we know hold some measure of importance to us. And it will all be gone - eventually. It's a very somber note yet it makes me feel a certain sense of peace.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

codyofficial,

This is a beautiful quote—thank you for sharing.

distractedcactus,
@distractedcactus@beehaw.org avatar

Several things are regularly in my “ponder and wonder” list, the most recent being:

  • Chaos theory
  • Higher dimensions (>4)
  • The actual scale of space versus our normal human scale
  • The idea of social/societal evolution (how can we be better together as a species)

I can get lost for a while in any of these topics.

l3mming,

You should have a look at Sebastian Lague’s programming videos on Youtube. He models various things (eg: predator/prey/ant colonies, slime growth) using a few very simple rules. They’re just beautiful. Example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-iSQQgOd1A

TitanLaGrange,

Plus he’s just fun to listen to!

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.

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.

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