
Swirling Bacteria Linked to the Physics of Phase Transitions - nature24
https://www.quantamagazine.org/swirling-bacteria-linked-to-the-physics-of-phase-transitions/
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nickpsecurity
It looks like they discovered Cellular Automata for living things. I wonder if
people in Active Matter know about CA's as it could give them ideas.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton)

EDIT: Appreciate the feedback from you two. :)

~~~
gaze
I should also say that phase transitions are used to describe the abrupt
change in physical parameters as some external conditions are changed.
Cellular automata to my knowledge don't really have continuously variable
parameters.

~~~
100ideas
> "In contrast to a well-mixed chemical reaction system, reaction–diffusion
> (RD) networks can produce spatial patterns, where some species are more
> abundant in some parts of the substrate and less abundant in others."

"Emulating cellular automata in chemical reaction–diffusion networks"

[http://schulmanlab.jhu.edu/papers/reaction-diffusion-ca-
jour...](http://schulmanlab.jhu.edu/papers/reaction-diffusion-ca-journal-
version.pdf)

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d--b
They should really stop linking things to "phase transitions". This is most
likely something that follows the Tracy Widom distribution, that has popped up
in many areas of maths and physics. Linking this to phase transitions is like
saying: "weather predictions linked to the physics of a dice being rolled"

~~~
sn9
Well here's _Quanta_ 's piece on the Tracy-Widom distrbution from a few years
ago: [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20141015-at-the-far-ends-
of-a...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20141015-at-the-far-ends-of-a-new-
universal-law/)

More people will have heard of phase transitions than T-W and it's certainly
not inaccurate while also using somewhat familiar analogies; so I think your
criticism doesn't make much sense for a popular science article.

