100 years after Einstein published five papers that rocked and then essentially overthrew the then-current physical understanding, the murmurs of discontent are arising. Theories extending, expanding, explaining or just plain overthrowing the tenets of the now-current model(s) are making the rounds. Fifty years after Wheeler's description of the space-time foam at the Planck scale, the discreteness of time and space that he was implying is becoming apparent, and the ideas behind this vision are becoming clearer, or at least less murky. In a society filled with computation and processes, it is no surprise that current metaphysics are being built around concepts of computation and process, discreteness and time steps. Pattern formation by self-referential algorithms, diagrams of data structures and their spontaneous self-manipulation, tessellation systems and their dynamics, self-perpetuating flaws and defects in processes ---- these and many other models are creeping out of the woodwork.
Ed Fredkin, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Tom Toffoli, Maja Kuzmanovic, Nik Gaffney, Karl Svozil, Dan B Miller, Hartwig Thim, Tim Boykett