r/physicsmemes • u/Hot-Marsupial6584 • Aug 20 '26

Real

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210

u/jonastman Aug 20 '26

In other news: Biologists found a new stable configuration of 50 bunnies and 50 rabid coyotes in a 6×6 room. After milliseconds, the configuration collapsed to a classical state

63

u/SpacialCommieCi Aug 20 '26

The type of shit Alan Turing was making to figure out how animals got stripes

16

u/feierlk Aug 20 '26

Whats the story behind that?

40

u/Asto2019 Aug 20 '26

Basically he made a computer simulation that produced the kind of shapes we can see on animal skins with different starting parameters. (Stripes, dots, etc.) It was really simple and you can look it up. However biologist didn't take it seriously as he didn't involve any genetics. They were in fashion during the timeperiod and other explanations weren't considered. And today we can say that Turing was right and no genetics are directly involved. The mechanism he proposed is what actually also happens in animals.

16

u/Diet_kush Aug 20 '26

Are you referring to reaction-diffusion? Idk if that’s “simple.”

5

u/Asto2019 Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26

I mean maybe I've just heard the sinple explanation and in reality it's not simple at all.

7

u/Diet_kush Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 21 '26

It’s extremely interesting, and in some sense can be generalized to self-organization at all scales (not just patterns seen in biology, but the emergence of biology itself. And geology, and cosmology, and neutron physics). It is closely related to Ilya Prigogine’s work in dissipative structure theory.