Chapter 7. Simulating physics
The physical world is the great teacher. A computer scientist is inclined to think of physics as the one supreme computation that has been running for billions of years. One can partially characterize the laws of physics as being (a) parallel, (b) homogeneous, and (c) local.
Regarding parallelism, the idea is that the world’s computation isn’t localized in some hidden controller chip, the computation is taking place everywhere at once. If you toss a rock into a pool of water, you see the ripples spread out in every direction. Each bit of water is computing the appropriate motion, and these computations add up to what we see as waves.
Homogeneity means that the same natural laws apply to all the objects in the system ...
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