I recently played with an old theory of mine involving fractals. While doing field work in the Proterozoic rocks of central Arizona, I was struck by the fractal nature of the tightly folded deformation. Fold geometries were clearly fractal – outcrops looked the same as the maps. By taking simple rules like fold angle and fold limb ratios and applying them to deform a line of set length, doing that operation several times, I was able to recreate the geometries I observed in the field. Including, as you write, some unexpected surprises of the relationship of foliation planes to fold planes and why the foliation was not uniform, but created an inscrutable pattern. It also resolved the space problems of tight (isoclinal) folding. I remember the day I found an outcrop that looked exactly like my construction. Problem was, my coworkers and bosses glazed over when I explained it to them, finally concluding I was a hippie from Boulder who was probably high, and certainly crazy. Every so often I think about publishing my work, at least as an abstract and poster session.

Anathem followed, and it is pure scifi, but no alien monsters, just a good unfolding story of scientific curiosity. Reamde is a present day adventure story but heavy on geek culture that features characters from the novel you just purchased. Seveneves is scifi again, and again no space monsters but the moon does blow up in the first page. There are a couple I haven’t read yet.

These books take up 18″ of my bookshelf, many of them signed, I’ve been lucky to attend a few of his talks. So, yeah, I am a huge fan. I find his writing nice and chewy, something I can sink my brain into.

Hope you enjoy. Not all do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson

Fun trivia: He writes his novels longhand with a fountain pen and does not do extensive editing.

The game can also serve as a didactic analogy, used to convey the somewhat counter-intuitive notion that design and organization can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer. For example, cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has used the analogy of Conway’s Life “universe” extensively to illustrate the possible evolution of complex philosophical constructs, such as consciousness and free will, from the relatively simple set of deterministic physical laws, which might govern our universe

Perhaps now you can see why I am so attracted to this concept…

Perhaps the phenomenology of the universe is merely the manifestation of a higher order set of mathematical functions or relations. Strange attractors may or may not play any role in what we call “physical reality”, but they are a very measurable artifact of the mathematics that lie beneath.

It appears that all physical phenomena are capable of being modeled by purely mathematical formalisms, but the reverse, that some of those formalisms generate artifacts (like SAs, or fractal phenomena in general) which even though they may have no physical reality open to observation or experiment, they give us a means of studying reality itself.

I’d also like to stress once again that you do a little research on cellular automata, like “Conway’s Game of Life” for some truly unexpected and mind-blowing examples of highly complex and life-like structures arising from a very few simple rules operating on a very simple and arbitrarily defined universe.

I don’t thing the idea of the universe as a hologram makes no sense, but the posibility it is a result of “fractal automata” is very tempting.

Needless to say, I haven’t worked out the details yet.

SA’s are a great way of understanding how nature works. Take climate. We’ve some simple functions interacting and repeating, establishing a “normal” climate. Change the variables in those functions (like CO2) and new normals emerge. However, change them constantly, and you get lots of new normals. And lots of new normals eventually can be called chaos.

Have you read Stephenson before? This latest is not my favorite of his yet I’ve enjoyed his pushing into the fantasy genre. As ever with Neal, the story is rooted in hard scifi, ancient religions, and classic literature; all with a descriptive prose and slightly Pynchonesque syntax. And if you are familiar with his work you’ll quickly see this as a continuation of his charcters’ multi-tome arcs. Completely stand novel, though.

Hope you enjoy it and look forward to hearing your impressions.