The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

I read this book many years ago but it remains outstanding in my mind, a book that really changed my outlook.

It's basically about the "game" Life, invented by the mathematician John Horton Conway. It's not really a game in any ordinary sense. It is a cellular automaton. Consider a two dimensional plane on which a square lattice is situated. Each site in the lattice houses a bit of state, a variable that takes on the values 0 or 1 at successive time steps. Each cell in the lattice follows the same rule. It looks at the states of its 8 neighbors in the lattice, along with its own state. It applies the rule then to determine its own state in the next time step. Every cell in the lattice applies the same rule, all cells together in lock show more step. Conway found a particular rule, deceptively simple, that gives rise to especially nice patterns of 0 and 1 appearing and evolving as time proceeds.

The basic shock of the books is to see how this one very simple rule can give rise to stunning complexity. Poundstone does a splendid job of building up patterns from simple to complex. The primitive rule is eminently understandable, but the patterns it can give rise to exceed any possible comprehension. It is not unreasonable to think that our universe is similarly constructed from similarly simple patterns. The conclusion is thus that it is not reasonable to expect the patterns that arise to be comprehensible.

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