[Mollusc] shells Shells grow through the secretion of rigid material from the soft lip or mantle of the animal inside, and over periods of months to years they form coiled structures that normally follow rather accurate equiangular spirals, typically right-handed. … Typically the corrugations are accurately symmetrical, and I suspect that they in effect represent slices through a lettuce-leaf-like structure formed from a surface with tree-like internal growth.

An initial condition is carefully constructed so that halfway through the evolution shown a simple arrangement of particles will be produced.

And through the construction of page 665 this then finally shows that a cyclic tag system can successfully emulate any cellular automaton—and can thus be universal.

In Europe through the Middle Ages there nevertheless remained widespread belief in animistic kinds of explanations. … Particularly since the work of Jean Piaget in the 1940s, young children are often said to go through a phase of animism, in which they interact with complex objects much as if they were alive and human.

The importance of explicitness Looking through this book, one striking difference with most previous scientific accounts is the presence of so many explicit pictures that show how every element in a system behaves.

Each complete string in a multiway system corresponds to a possible slice that goes through all connections across a causal network.

In the pipelined approach, there is just a single processor (or perhaps a few processors) through which the data on different cells is successively piped. The key point, however, is that at every stage it is easy to know what data will be needed, so this data can be prefetched, potentially through a specially built memory system.

But soon I had seen many examples where the stated results of physics experiments were incorrect, either through straightforward mistakes or through subtly prejudiced analysis.

But in fact, as the pictures below show—and as we have seen many times in this book—it is also possible for randomness to arise intrinsically just through the application of simple underlying rules.

Most likely their overall shapes are determined before they harden through minimization of area by surface tension.