Page 140 - Visions of the Future Chemistry and Life Science

The making of the virtual heart 129

also see that there are complicated rules of ‘who goes first’ at crossings,
although they would not appear to be perfect. In short – you would discover
a complex code for auto-motion.

Conversely, you might observe that – most of the time – all cars are
stationary!
In your report you would summarise your observations. Your conclu-
sions could range from ‘cars are all different’ to ‘they are all the same’, or
from ‘cars are made for driving’ to ‘they are for parking’.
What a muddle!
To shed more light on this, you might try to generalise all findings. You
could develop a model concept of car use by humans, based on apparent
traffic rules.
This would be a challenging task as you would have to understand the
Highway Code from the observed behaviour of other road users! However,
you might come up with a reasonably close model of national traffic rules.
And you would not need to give detailed descriptions of individual compo-
nents of a car to do so.
If, however, all cars would stop as a consequence of an oil crisis,
governmental budget, or other major disaster – you would realise that there
is no way of fully understanding the rules of auto-motion without address-
ing how an engine works.