In my 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article
I speculated on what would happen if we constructed a gigantic computer
model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years
ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics
(the gravitational and electromagnetic forces and the strong and weak
nuclear forces) would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on
our planet. If we ran such a simulation out to the present day, I asked,
would it predict that the basic forces of Nature would reorganize the basic
particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and
novels, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers with supersonic jets parked
on deck, and computers connected to laser printers, CRTs and keyboards?
A friend read my article and said, computers have advanced a lot in the
last seven years, I think we could actually try such a simulation on my new
laptop now. So I wrote the program–in Fortran, naturally–and we tried it.
It took several minutes, and at the end of the simulation we dumped the
final coordinates of all the particles into a rather large data file, then
ran MATLAB to plot them. Some interesting things had happened, a few
mountains and valleys and volcanos had formed, but no computers, no
encyclopedias, and no cars or trucks. My friend said, let me see your
program. After examining it, he exclaimed, no wonder, you treated the
Earth as a closed system, order can’t increase in a closed system. The
Earth is an open system, you need to take into account the effect of the
sun’s energy. So I modified the boundary conditions to simulate the effect
of the entering solar radiation, and reran it. This time some more
interesting things happened, but still no libraries or computers…