Bizarre travelling flame discovery

Excitable Mediums (Media?) are really interesting and you can make one with lighter fluid and a little trough!

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00:00 - traveling flames

CORRECTIONS

7:33 - Geographic tongue is NOT an infection. It is also not infectious. And it is benign.

[SteveMould]

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.

[Etx-z]

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

[jabrark]

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

[lignesdefuite]

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.

[RichardKCollins]

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.

[bibekdebroy]

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

[robertrutz]

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!!

[willoliver]

all i could think about this whole video is how dope a restaurant that serves haute cuisine on plates with designs like these would be

[TheDIYScienceGuy]

My kids are also an excitable medium. To get them playing, I just need to help them start, and then it's self-sustaining for a short while. I just need to figure out a way to keep it going for a longer time. 🤔 great video, as always!

[alexwood]

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.

[ketv]

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.

[ahetzel]

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!

[WHYZMAN_]

This is one of the coolest channels on youtube- the concepts you introduce always get me exited like I'm a kid again!

[ridcullylives]

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!

[vsd]

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!

[jayjaymcfly]

I have seen:
- Piles of matches' heads
- every magnet composition
- various stuff thrown from heights
- Presses that destroy stuff
- every flamable liquid
- every explosive compund
- every aggressive chemical
- everything that up to 1k car batteries can do
- everything voltage up to a trillion volt
- every weird lego idea
- everything you can make music with
- I know how you can make/clean a roof in seconds.
- I have seen so many laser-cleaned coins
- everything liquid nitrogen can do



I thought I was done, I felt complete.






until now

[TheRealKeymaster]

Instead of the "sun"-like shape, you could have a circle in a middle, which is surrounded by spirals instead of the straight lines. I would love to see that, I think that would look so amazing!

[emockensturm]

If fluid clings to track, Moebius strip

[zbigniewchlebicki]

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.

[TheBitGuy]

Now you just need to figure out a way to have the lighter fluid replenished as the flame goes, so you could keep something like that running indefinitely.