Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) Harvard University

“If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on creation, I should have recommended something simpler.”  This sentiment, supposedly the response of Alfonso X, King of León and Castile, to the explanation of Ptolemaic astronomy, is likely to be shared by anyone who delves into algorithms for simulating the physical universe. Nature seems to have no difficulty with n-body problems, protein folding or fluid turbulence, but these phenomena are tedious, messy and computationally expensive when you try to capture them in code. Really serious physics, such as quantum field theory, gets far worse. The very difficulty of some of these problems may tell us something about the connections between physics and computation.

 

Brian Hayes is Senior Writer for American Scientist magazine, where he writes the "Computing Science" column. A collection of his essays, Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions, was published earlier this year by Hill and Wang.