statistical physics – Quanta Magazine

How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists

Jonathan O'Callaghan — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 14:20:38 +0000

The universe bets on disorder. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. All of those dye molecules are going to slowly spread throughout the water. Physicists quantify this tendency to spread by counting the number of possible ways the dye molecules can be arranged. There’s one possible state where the molecules are crowded into the thimble.

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Scientists Discover Exotic New Patterns of Synchronization

Natalie Wolchover — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 15:30:29 +0000

When the incoherent claps of a crowd suddenly become a pulse, as everyone starts clapping in unison, who decided? Not you; not anyone. Crickets sing in synchrony; metronomes placed side by side sway into lockstep; some fireflies blink together in the dark. All across the United States, the power grid operates at 60 hertz, its innumerable tributaries of alternating current synchronizing of their...

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How Complex Wholes Emerge From Simple Parts

John Rennie — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 15:10:20 +0000

You could spend a lifetime studying an individual water molecule and never deduce the precise hardness or slipperiness of ice. Watch a lone ant under a microscope for as long as you like, and you still couldn’t predict that thousands of them might collaboratively build bridges with their bodies to span gaps. Scrutinize the birds in a flock or the fish in a school and you wouldn’t find one that’s...

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A Chemist Shines Light on a Surprising Prime Number Pattern

Natalie Wolchover — Mon, 14 May 2018 05:05:02 +0000

About a year ago, the theoretical chemist Salvatore Torquato met with the number theorist Matthew de Courcy-Ireland to explain that he had done something highly unorthodox with prime numbers, those positive integers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. A professor of chemistry at Princeton University, Torquato normally studies patterns in the structure of physical systems...

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The Atomic Theory of Origami

Marcus Woo — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 15:10:38 +0000

In 1970, an astrophysicist named Koryo Miura conceived what would become one of the most well-known and well-studied folds in origami: the Miura-ori. The pattern of creases forms a tessellation of parallelograms, and the whole structure collapses and unfolds in a single motion — providing an elegant way to fold a map. It also proved an efficient way to pack a solar panel for a spacecraft...

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