Nova Spivack posted this praise of digital physics and Julie Lerman reports that Stephen Wolfram is coming to her neck of the woods. Digital physics, of which Wolfram’s book A Kind of Science hopes to be the Principia, posits the idea that the universe is computational in nature, which is to say that behavior over time (gravity, mass, etc.) comes from repeated application of a (relatively) small set of rules to a matrix of state changing automata. Cellular automata are used as their model. CA are a fascinating topic, but to me digital physics has always seemed a non-starter: Buckminster Fuller anticipated my objection with this quote: "To how many places does nature carry out PI when she makes each successive bubble in the white-cresting surf of each successive wave before nature finds out that PI can never be resolved?... And at what moment in the making of each separate bubble in the Universe does nature decide to terminate her eternally frustrated calculating and instead turn out a fake sphere?"