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Swirling Bacteria Linked to the Physics of Phase Transitions
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nickpsecurity 9y agoIt looks like they discovered Cellular Automata for living things. I wonder if people in Active Matter know about CA's as it could give them ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton EDIT: Appreciate the feedback from you two. :)
- gaze 9y agoLong range order is sometimes exhibited by cellular automata, but cellular automata is too general a framework much of the time to be a useful calculational tool. In other words, they do know of it, and the formalism doesn't make these kinds of predications to my knowledge
- gaze 9y agoI should also say that phase transitions are used to describe the abrupt change in physical parameters as some external conditions are changed. Cellular automata to my knowledge don't really have continuously variable parameters.
- 100ideas 9y ago> "In contrast to a well-mixed chemical reaction system, reaction–diffusion (RD) networks can produce spatial patterns, where some species are more abundant in some parts of the substrate and less abundant in others." "Emulating cellular automata in chemical reaction–diffusion networks" http://schulmanlab.jhu.edu/papers/reaction-diffusion-ca-journal-version.pdf http://schulmanlab.jhu.edu/papers/reaction-diffusion-ca-jour...
- d--b 9y agoThey should really stop linking things to "phase transitions". This is most likely something that follows the Tracy Widom distribution, that has popped up in many areas of maths and physics. Linking this to phase transitions is like saying: "weather predictions linked to the physics of a dice being rolled"
- sn9 9y agoWell here's Quanta's piece on the Tracy-Widom distrbution from a few years ago: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20141015-at-the-far-ends-of-a-new-universal-law/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20141015-at-the-far-ends-of-a... More people will have heard of phase transitions than T-W and it's certainly not inaccurate while also using somewhat familiar analogies; so I think your criticism doesn't make much sense for a popular science article.
- macawfish 9y agoI disagree, I love Quanta magazine precisely because of this kind of story telling. And aside from that, these researchers are developing a kind of statistical mechanics of "active matter". Why shouldn't such a theory involve "phase transitions"?