[jerf]

It's interesting, but I'm at a loss as to what's even remotely new about it. Unless the computer that you typed this on is very, very different from mine that I'm typing this on, there isn't any living components in it, yet it is "computing" and "deciding" quite a bit. There's a ton of natural processes that incorporate some feedback element and can be said without much stretching to be doing a computation. We're beyond science on that matter, we're decades if not centuries into engineering with these facts. (It's not hard to say a steam engine is "computing" parameters to keep itself running, for instance, and h

Maybe it's just my bias as a computer scientist, but I would never dream that they would find anything but what they found. Having read the paper, they're basically proposing alternate models of computations, but computer scientists have hardly been blinded by transistors; proposing alternate models is a hobby, and there's at least one large one getting a lot of study to the point that I expect everyone will just understand the acronym without my expansion, QC. We've computed with water (both macroscopic and microfluidics), mechanical machinery (i.e., cogs not transistors), chemistry, DNA, analog circuitry, and light, and I'm sure that's not a complete list. We've hypothesized computing with mechanical nanotechnology, von Neuman replicators (up to and including converting entire astronomical bodies), black holes, closed timelike curves, and the fundamental structure of spacetime itself. If this was proposed as a Master's thesis in computer science, the advisor would advise the student to do something less pedestrian.

That doesn't make this paper "bad" in some absolute sense, but I'm surprised it's publishable, since for better or worse that incorporates a certain amount of novelty in its criteria.

[semi-extrinsic]

I'm also surprised this is publishable, particularly in NJP, as it is a respectable journal and their scope explicitly states:

"An article must meet the highest scientific quality standards, both in terms of originality and significance, and the research results should make substantial advances within a particular subfield of physics."

[zeidrich]

Science is composition.

We build a bit, we test, if it's solid, we build a bit more. We don't need to come up with hypothetical black hole computers.

The paper and the concept of TOW dynamics has been referenced in http://www.nature.com/articles/srep13253 which shares one of the authors and is interesting in a different way.

I get tired of people saying things that aren't exciting enough shouldn't be published. It's not the exciting things that make the breakthroughs, it's understanding a bit more about the things we've always figured are obvious. To me this is more interesting than some hypothetical black hole computer. Sure it's not blowing me away.

It's just a block. A little block. Other ideas can choose to use that block or not. I haven't seen that system of tug-of-war dynamics described before. It seems solid, so why not describe it?

Or does it need to be antimatter hoverboards to be worth publishing?

[jerf]

Read my post more carefully before leaping to conclusions, please. You appear to have been blinded by some words and failed to read through them properly. You're trying to lecture me about how science works, when in fact you're the one who is being quite wrong about it. Especially re-read my last sentence, carefully.