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In the beginning was a graph, more like diamond than graphite. Every node in this graph was tetravalent: connected by four edges to four other nodes. By a count
by codeulike 11y ago
In the beginning was a graph, more like diamond than graphite. Every node in this graph was tetravalent: connected by four edges to four other nodes. By a count of edges, the shortest path from any node back to itself was a loop six edges long. Every node belonged to twenty-four such loops, as well as forty-eight loops eight edges long, and four hundred eighty that were ten edges long. The edges had no length or shape, the nodes no position; the graph consisted only of the fact that some nodes were connected to others. This pattern of connections, repeated endlessly, was all there was.
Intro to Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan. He was obviously thinking along similar lines.
- wlievens 11y agoLoved that book. Despite the cardboard characters :-) Please tell me that last act made your think of Cellular Automata too!
- sanderjd 11y agoThank you, I had forgotten how much I loved that book. Time for a new Greg Egan kick!
- hodwik 11y agoThat's a pretty neat idea. Then you could have gravity caused by structure -- the closer the nodes are to each-other, and the more nodes in an area there are, the easier the nodes fall into a lattice/crystal -- making masses attract. And conversely space could just be a limit to information density. If that's roughly what Wolfram was saying, I'm sorry, I couldn't read his jerk-session.
- hodwik2 11y agoOr the lattice is infinite in all directions, and is "pulled" against. So even as local objects want to fall into lattice, the fact that the network is infinite "pulls" the "space" away from the lattice. So close together the lattice force works, but it is weak across long distances, in comparison to the pulling force of the rest of the lattice out towards infinity. I really have no idea what I'm talking about.
- FiatLuxDave 11y agoI haven't read Schild's Ladder, but that section strongly reminds me of a lecture I attended by David Finkelstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Finkelstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Finkelstein) given to a physics department composed largely of condensed matter physicists. He basically said that he was going to attempt to explain space-time as a crystal structure, and he said that structure was most analogous to diamond. Then he used condensed matter formalisms to explore the crystal structure and explain how this created the properties of space-time that we see. This was back in 1996 or so.