A Brain Cell is the Same as the Universe
by Cliff Pickover, Reality Carnival
Physicists discover that the structure of a brain cell is the same as the entire universe.
"Oh God, guide me, protect me; make of me a shining lamp and a brilliant star." -- Abdu’l-Bahá
Original article here
A piece from Wired magazine
"Few ideas are so preposterous that no one at all takes them seriously, and this idea — that God, or at least the universe, might be the ultimate large-scale computer — is actually less preposterous than most. The first scientist to consider it, minus the whimsy or irony, was Konrad Zuse, a little-known German who conceived of programmable digital computers 10 years before von Neumann and friends. In 1967, Zuse outlined his idea that the universe ran on a grid of cellular automata, or CA. Simultaneously, Ed Fredkin was considering the same idea. Self-educated, opinionated, and independently wealthy, Fredkin hung around early computer scientists exploring CAs. In the 1960s, he began to wonder if he could use computation as the basis for an understanding of physics."
The gist of the piece is that the universe is a super computer and the more you delve into that hypothesis the harder it is to rule out.
While for years the clockwork of the universe is often explained with bell curves, standard deviations and probabilities; fractal geometry gives a different representation of more and more granularity and detail the closer you inspect.
As an awe inspiring mountain from 30,000 feet can be reduced to a collection of rocks and boulders on close inspection; the machinations of the cosmos can be reduced to its infinitesimally small counterpart the neuron.
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