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DanielVarga comments on Ask an experimental physicist - Less Wrong
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You can build outside walls out of billiard balls. Eventually, such a system will disintegrate, but this is no different from any other type of computer. The important thing is that for any given computation length you can build such a system. The size of the system will grow with required computation length, but only polynomially.
I would be interested in seeing a metastable gate constructed solely out of billiard balls. Care to come up with a design?
Ah, now I see your point. I had this misconception that if you send a billiard ball into a huge brick-wall of billiard balls, it will bounce back. Okay, I don't have a design.
It sure will, after imparting some momentum to the wall. My point is that I do not know how to construct a gate out of components interacting only through repulsive forces. I am not saying that it is impossible, I just do not see how it can be done.
How much momentum will it lose before it bounces back? If a large enough wall can make this arbitrarily small, then I think the Fredkin and Toffoli billiard gates can be built out of a thick wall of billiard balls. Lucky thing, in this model there is no friction, so gates can be arbitrarily large. Sure, the system might start to misbehave after the walls move by epsilon, but this doesn't seem like a serious problem. In the worst case, we can use throw-away gates that are abandoned after one use. That model is still as strong as Boolean circuits.