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!
thermodynamics. it sets hard physical boundary to what happens spontaneously and what can’t, how much energy you need to pump in or can recover from process, but not only that - it’s very broadly applicable, including large parts of chemistry, biology, information theory and more, like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system
The concept of emergence blows my mind.
We have this property in our universe where simple things with simple rules can create infinitely complex things and behaviours. A molecule of water can’t be wet, but water can. A single ant can’t really do anything by himself, but a colony with simple pheromone exchange mechanisms can assign jobs, regulate population, create huge anthills with vents, specialty rooms and highways.
Nothing within a cell is “alive”, it’s just atoms and molecules, but the cell itself is. One cell cannot experience things, think, love, have hopes and dreams, or want to watch Netflix all day, but a human can.
The fact that lots of tiny useless things governed by really simple rules can create this complexity in this world is breathtakingly beautiful.
Kinda ties into your example :)
Reminds me of the statement that you can’t dissect a rabbit to find out why it’s cute
Won’t stop me from trying [joking]
Don’t, rabbit necropsies are the worst smelling thing you’ll ever encounter.
People working together to solve problems without personal profit as the main incentive.
Evolution as a concept; not just biological. The fact that you can explain the rise of complex systems with just three things - inheritance, mutation, selection. It’s so simple, yet so powerful.
Perhaps not surprisingly it’s directly tied to what OP is talking about cellular automata.
There’s something interesting in here about the persistence of legacy systems that I can’t quite put my finger on. Rest assured I will be consumed by the thought for the remainder of the day.
There are plenty things that we could talk about legacy systems from an evolutionary approach. It’s specially fun when you notice similarities between software and other (yup!) evolutionary systems.
For example. In Biology you’ll often see messy biological genetic pools, full of clearly sub-optimal alleles for a given environment, decreasing in frequency over time but never fully disappearing. They’re a lot like machines running Windows XP in 2023, it’s just that the selective pressure towards more modern Windows versions was never harsh enough to get rid of them completely.
Or leftovers in languages that work, but they don’t make synchronic sense when you look at other features of the language. Stuff like gender/case in English pronouns, Portuguese proclisis (SOV leftover from Latin in a SVO language), or Italian irregular plurals (leftovers of Latin defunct neuter gender). It’s like modern sites that still need animated .GIF support, even if .WEBM would be more consistent with the modern internet.
Symbiosis in nature….it always brings up feelings of awe and wonder for me. Especially in forests. The “wood-wide web” or “mycorrhizal network” being my latest obsession . The fact that the fungi joins the trees together through the roots to allow for exchange of nutrients, water, and chemical signals between plants. And then there’s the forest canopy, and the role it plays in keeping the forest healthy.
Trees are awesome.
- Free software
- Group theory, Church notation and Lambda Calculus making many things in Math under one roof
- Design of CPU and Operating Systems. Both fields are made by geniuses.
I was kinda oblivious to the world of FOSS until simultaneously switching to Lemmy and also resuscitating an old computer by installing Linux. It took a long time for me to wrap my head around the fact that people are just cranking out parts of OS’s, or pw managers, or file zip utilities for shits and giggles in their free time, and not even charging for it. A game or two as a passion project I could understand, but who sits down after work and plods through a zip utility?
After years and years of “if the service is free, you’re the product” it really takes some time to rewire my brain. It’s almost enough to make me wish I went into software instead of mechanical, so I could pitch in on something.
You could design parts or projects for 3D printing
Nix
Adjacent xkcd Https://xkcd.com/350
Galaxies are not evenly distributed in space. Instead, when you look at the universe, galaxies are grouped in giant strings that look like a neural connections in a brain.
It blew my mind when I learned that we’re in a relatively dark, empty part of space compared to what’s out there. It really put into perspective for me how difficult space travel will be for us as we continue to advance.
Space is incomprehensibly big and its getting larger over time. We will never have meaningful travel outside the solar system. If humanity started traveling in space from the moment we evolved, we would be able to travel the length of the milky way around two times. Space is basically a boondoggle. Our solar system still contains lots of resources though, so its not totally worthless.
Yea … like Star Trek, with warp speed and everything, is basically all limited to our single Galaxy … and that’s not unrealistic given their technology.
Like in that space-faring future, the galaxy is basically the new continent and the inter-galactic divide the new great ocean that no one has ever crossed.
Tom Paris and the Cochrane have entered the chat
I am focusing on the “blow my mind” part, rather than the “beautiful” part of your question, but I am certain many philosophically-minded people would consider the following “beautiful”.
Peter Singer’s argument in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972)” that you and most everyone you know are probably immoral or evil and you don’t even realize it. It really affected my ideas of how to strive to live.
Here is a good video explaining the idea in detail, worth 30m of your time.
I’ve watched like 10 minutes and I hate it. Peter Singer is a very controversial figure as it is, on top of that the guy in the video comes off as super condescending to me and I can’t stand watching him for longer. Me personally, I don’t think it’s “immoral” to not give money to charity. And terms like immoral or evil are usually defined by the society you live in and not some random philosopher. And I bet there are good reasons his radical ideas in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” did not get embedded in our society yet.
I’d say that charity as it exists in a capitalist society is in itself evil, and contributing to it is no better then buying indulgences.
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Noether’s Theorem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem
https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/noether.html
Fundamentally, it allows us to logically infer the conservation laws from the laws of motion of a given physical system using relatively simple math. It always applies, no matter if we’re talking about massive systems or quantum ones.
BitTorrent. I only need to share a file once and it could potentially reach millions of people. It’s old tech now but it feels like magic to me.
One of the best pieces of software ever. And it actually works, that’s the crazy thing!
