Every good physicist must have a crackpot detector to keep himself or herself from wasting time on crackpot theories. Nevertheless, almost all physicists spend almost all of their time working on wrong theories in the hope that they will eventually find a correct theory, or at least, an important wrong theory. Witness Pauli’s famous remark, “That theory is worthless, it isn’t even wrong.” All of the wrong theories that physicists respect fall into a certain set of accepted classes; they are all trying to mine in fields where pay dirt is found from time to time. DM will not appear to be in any such field and that conclusion is correct. But given a suspension of disbelief, it is possible to grasp the overall picture and to find it actually compelling.
An interesting observation about Universal CA’s is that their operation often gives rise to unending complexity despite starting from extraordinary simple initial conditions. A Universe that is as cosmologically complex as ours, with planets as complex as the Earth, with phenomena as complex as life and QM; all these are perfectly reasonable consequences of the operation of a RUCA starting from an extremely simple initial condition.
