The Pixelated Universe

Cellular Automata have received a lot of attention ever since the publication of Stephen Wolfram’s book, A New Kind of Science. I found the ideas fascinating, the diagrams beautiful, but was ultimately disappointed at the lack of any real-world proofs.

While there may be no real connection to Wolfram’s work, it’s interesting to note that scientists such as Craig J. Hogan of the University of Washington, exploring the emerging field of quantum gravity, have theorized that a given region of spacetime has a limited amount of information that it can contain. This is known as the Holographic Principle. Roughly stated, it limits the amount of information that can be contain by a given area to be about 10⁶⁹ bits per square meter. Given the dimensions of the early universe, it would work out to around a gigabyte of data, easily storable on a CD-ROM.

Generate an automata here.