Bizarre travelling flame discovery

I don't think it can be used to make a logic gates, otherwise you know I'd be trying to make a binary adder right now. The sponsor is Jane Street. Check out their opportunities bit.ly/3vpLNVW

Never thought I'd see an analogue loading-screen icon.

If fluid clings to track, Moebius strip

Just found out, men are excitable media: "the first is that after it has been excited, it can't be excited again right away. The second characteristic is that after a certain amount of time the medium is once again excitable." Made me chuckle way too much for my age. Love the vids, you're amazing, Steve!

This concept is actually very similar to the principle that is used in rotating detonation engines. These are engines where the flame is supersonic (so a detonation instead of a deflagration) and the detonation travels in a circular path continuously. You should do a video about those. They're super interesting.

Every engineer in the room: "I'm definitely a responsible adult"

Physician here, found an interesting parallel to a cardiac arrhythmia in one of the models. At 10:26, the small loop of the ‘flame splitting’ model starts its own circuit, increasing the activation rate of the larger loop. This is very similar to the cardiac arrhythmia ‘AV node reentry tachycardia.’ The cardiac conduction system is also an excitable medium that meets the 3 criteria mentioned my Steve in the video. This flame model could be an interesting was to demonstrate or study this disorder. Thought this was interesting and wanted to share. Thanks for always making interesting and stimulating content, Steve!!

Not only is the material fascinating, but the presenter's communication style is very easy to understand and very pleasant to experience. What a combo!

I work in healthcare in a field where medication-induced cardiac fibrillation is a constant risk to be managed (via QT prolongation), and use the stadium wave to explain torsades de pointes probably once a month. Your branched ring-exciter models are also literally how a special form of atrial fibrillation, called atrial flutter, takes place in the ring of muscle surrounding the great vessels of the right atrium. Great video and super interesting practical model.

"Excitable Mediums" sounds like a great business name for a REALLY extroverted fortune teller.

The idea of a constantly rotating forest fire all the way around a planet was a major plot point in the book "the player of games" by Iain M Banks. It's a good book, I recommend it.

Reminds me of the "Super Kamiokande" experiment, a huge vat of purified water completely surrounded by 11,000 large (50-cm), custom-made photomultiplier tubes. It was designed to detect flashes of light from rare events like proton decay and neutrino collisions. The tubes were evacuated glass structures, and when one imploded one day, it triggered the implosion of its neighbors, and, well . . . regeneration time was better than forest regrowth, but not by much. "Super Kamiokande 2" had acrylic shields between the tubes.

I find it so crazy how this was just randomly discovered. And I love how you took it and just ran away with it trying all these different setups to understand what exactly was happening. What a fun video!

Forest fire loops may not have been observed, but there's a known phenomenon in high-elevation forests in my part of the world, called 'fir waves' (check Wikipedia). The excitable state is fir trees' susceptibility to wind damage and desiccation, and the refractory state is when the tree is short enough to be protected from damage by its neighbours. There's a period of about 75 years, and alternating bands of fir trees in various stages of development are observed on the slopes of many of the mountains around here. The bands propagate slowly eastward, in the direction that the prevailing westerly wind blows.

I'm a resident doctor and this made me think of all the ways this shows up in our bodies--specifically the nervous system. The "split" track that sometimes feeds back on itself and creates a self-sustaining mini-loop is a wonderful model of how some very common heart rhythm issues develop!

About 1974/1975 I wss at the University of Texas at Austin. Ilya Prigogine was there with his group and they were studying chemical clocks, and chemical oscillators. Now Prigogine got his Nobel prize in 1977 for a range of things with names like "dissipative structures", "systems far from equilibrium", "internal self organization", "irreversible thermodynamics". My point is this kind of play with periodic and repeatable phenomena is the stuff that might lead to a nice prize, or something like a new engine or battery design, or a new toy that makes more money. Now I was going to send this and I remembered "tornadoes" and "solitons". Those self sustaining structure can remain stable as long as there is energy available, or there is no "dissipation". The non-linear Schrodinger equation can lead to solitons and stable states of the vacuum can form matter. I STRONGLY encourage you to devote time to models and and equations. The models (like your game of life) are much easier to play with than symbolic math because a model or digital twin will "do something" and most math still requires the human to do all the work - by hand and memorization. I remember UT fondly and often think of the nuclear fusion group there. They were really excited, then they seem to have given up. But "self sustaining reactions" take on new meaning when one solves the same kinds of models, the same kinds of hints from mathematics -- for nuclear reactions and nuclear fusion propulsion systems. Look at the Wikipedia article on "reaction-diffusion systems". and you will see "traveling wave front" and other useful starting points. Filed as (Self sustaining reactions, solitons and Nobel prizes, wave fronts, atomic and nuclear space ships) Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation Yes, it can be used for computing.

I love how most science is just, "WOAH, how did that happen? Can we do it again?"

This is basically how Rotating Detonation Engines work except the wave front is supersonic and therefore compressing the gases, removing the need for a compressor The circle with spokes is like a RDE combined with pulse detonation engines lol but great work!

You can create one-way tunnel - it is a step which is short enough for the flame to go up, but high enough so it cannot go back down. You can put it in the generator loops to stabilize them. You have a non-connecting crossing already in the 8 symbol and a a splitter. The only missing part is the NOT gate and we can have a running flame computer with no moving parts and no electricity.

I am sincerely so grateful this channel exists. Thank you so much for every one of your videos - they all blow my mind, and make me want to learn more