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Investigating · emergence

Reaction–diffusion scale selection

Does a structureless chemical soup spontaneously organise into a pattern with a reproducible length scale — set by the chemistry, not by the random seed?

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How the lab tests it

Run the Gray–Scott two-species reaction–diffusion system on a toroidal grid from a noisy uniform soup; once it settles, measure the characteristic wavelength λ from the first off-zero peak of the spatial autocorrelation of the activator field, and re-seed to see whether λ recurs while the pattern never does.

What it looks for

a reproducible, seed-independent characteristic wavelength λ (same physics → same scale) — an emergent length with no clean closed-form value (this is the self-replicating/pulse regime, not a linear Turing bifurcation with an analytic wavelength)

This is one world in the PHS lab — 91 interactive simulations, each posing a question and measuring the answer. See the catalogued findings.