We already do this for electromagnetic waves. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-difference_time-domain_method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-differ

We already do this for electromagnetic waves. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-difference_time-domain_method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-difference_time-domain_m... Since each field component in the voxel depends only on its immediate neighbours, you can perform massively parallel simulations on GPUs. I've worked on this stuff, it's pretty neat. Discretizing continuous differential equations onto a voxel lattice is how a lot of things these days are done, including seismic and medical imaging.