Asklemmy

43950 readers

971 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

348

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

submitted 1 year ago by aCosmicWave@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

161 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!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] pyrrhus@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

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.