I wrote scripts that make it possible to visualize the spacetime of Conway's Game of Life cellular automata using the software Golly and Blender.
The renderings I've created primarily depict "oscillators", which are special patterns in Conways Game of Life that
return to their original state after some number of cycles. By lining up rows of oscillators, they start to resemble a tapestry of oscillator patterns.
The concept originated from a desire to visualize spacetime in our universe, which is challenging since we're so accustomed to viewing
our universe through the perspective of the linear passing of time rather than viewing spacetime as a singular object.
Because Conway's Game of Life simulates a simplified version of "life" within a two dimensional universe,
its spacetime can be converted into a cohesive 3D object that is easy to view and understand from our perspective.
In my research, I came across the following description of spacetime from science fiction author Robert Heinlein's 1939 short story, Life-Line.
It's interesting to compare his description with what emerges within the spacetime of Conway's Game of Life.
He stepped up to one of the reporters. "Suppose we take you as an example. Your name is Rogers, is it not? Very well, Rogers, you
are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten
inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event reaching to perhaps nineteen-sixteen, of which we see
a cross-section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and
drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man someplace in the nineteen-eighties. Imagine this space-
time event which we call Rogers as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end at his mother's womb, the other at the
grave. It stretches past us here and the cross-section we see appears as a single discrete body. But that is an illusion. There is
physical continuity to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine
whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross-section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing
that the shootlets were discrete individuals.
