Self sustaining reactions, solitons and Nobel prizes, wave fronts, atomic and nuclear space ships
Steve Mould: Bizarre traveling flame discovery at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqhXQUzVMlQ
About 1974/1975 I wss at the University of Texas at Austin. Ilya Prigogine was there with his group and they were studying chemical clocks, and chemical oscillators. Now Prigogine got his Nobel prize in 1977 for a range of things with names like “dissipative structures”, “systems far from equilibrium”, “internal self organization”, “irreversible thermodynamics”.
My point is this kind of play with periodic and repeatable phenomena is the stuff that might lead to a nice prize, or something like a new engine or battery design, or a new toy that makes more money.
Now I was going to send this and I remembered “tornadoes” and “solitons”. Those self sustaining structure can remain stable as long as there is energy available, or there is no “dissipation”. The non-linear Schrodinger equation can lead to solitons and stable states of the vacuum can form matter.
I STRONGLY encourage you to devote time to models and equations. The models (like your game of life) are much easier to play with than symbolic math because a model or digital twin will “do something” and most math still requires the human to do all the work – by hand and memorization.
I remember UT fondly and often think of the nuclear fusion group there. They were really excited, then they seem to have given up. But “self sustaining reactions” take on new meaning when one solves the same kinds of models, the same kinds of hints from mathematics — for nuclear reactions and nuclear fusion propulsion systems.
Look at the Wikipedia article on “reaction-diffusion systems”. and you will see “traveling wave front” and other useful starting points.
Filed as (Self sustaining reactions, solitons and Nobel prizes, wave fronts, atomic and nuclear space ships)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
Yes, it can be used for computing.
“flame fronts”, “pulse detonation engines”, “deflagration wave”, “detonation waves”, “traveling wave” “accelerator”, “wakefield”, “wakefield” (“acceleration” OR “accelerator”), “plasma acceleration”, “plasma wakefield accelerator”, “plasma accelerator”, “laser-accelerated” “electron beams”
