Rudy Rucker explains three world-views of physics in the second chapter of The Lifebox, The Seashell, And the Soul: the mathematical physics view, the continuous cellular automaton view, and the particle system view. I sorted the three from the view I most understand which is what they taught me in high school to the view I least understood, the view they tried to teach me in university, which forever soured me on the subject. (As for celular automata, they didn't even try to teach us that in school!) The ramp from discussing cellular automata in the book is pretty steep, so I could probably use a book-length treatment of the subject with a nice, gradual incline.
Earlier in the chapter, Rucker defines analog and digital not in terms of absoultes, but in terms of the size of discrete possibilities. His definitions I find satisfying, adding nuance to the definitions of them I had in my head, wihch were something along the line of digital == ones and zeros and analog == fuzzy values. Another satisfying definition—or rather, illustration—comes when he discusses chaos and the effects of small differences from experiment to experiment lead us to conclude that we have to think in terms of averages and probabilities and not absolute laws when predicting events in our physical world. But just as the honours physics class I mistakenly took at SFU lost me with quantum physics, so does Rucker, with photos behaving as a wave and particle based on how one observes the behavior.
The discussion then turns to theories of reality, and Rucker seems to be arguing that time (such a "past" and "future") are an illusion—lunchtime, said Ford Prefect, doubly so. Cause and effect don't so much not exist but rather causes and effects send messages to each other forward and backward through time. This theory, if I'm summarizing it accurately, doesn't get Rucker into the Wikipedia page on the philosophy of space and time, but at least it gives people like me who need an excuse not to attend a meeting in the future by saying we are living in an 'eternal now'. Or something: the argument relies heavily on the scenario presented on pages 138-139 which don't make a lick of sense to this political science major.