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!
Thank you! I love this breakdown. I had a suspicion it was like this all along but lack the astrophysics background.
Not sure why astrophysicists are so quick to pull a Tonya Harding, though.
They hate to admit it, and it’s definitely less in-your-face most of the time because of the expected formality of the scientific community, but physicists, and specifically those trying to make advancements like we see around black holes, are SUPER arrogant. For the first 2 scenarios listed, they usually only make a formal paper out of the discovery to later defend the drawback as something they can “work around”. Either by “oh we’ll definitely eventually figure out how to emperically verify this haha. Look how well it works, you’d be crazy not to believe in this”, or the more extreme “This obviously constitutes a whole rewrite of our understanding of physics because my solution is so elegant except for the parts where it literally doesn’t work”
That last one is less prone to arrogance because topology is working with an insane amount of unverifiable possibilities already, so they don’t really tend to get too attached to any given solution.