Entropy and the geometry of digital alchemy.
SHARON GLOTZER, via Quanta Magazine:
Imagine if you had baseballs in a pool of water, and imagine that they had exactly the same density as the pool, so they didn’t sink, they didn’t float, they were just suspended, jostling about. Then you try to confine them all together. Self-assembly is what happens when the baseballs spontaneously organize themselves into a recognizable pattern. And if the particles are perfectly hard and have no other interactions, they will organize themselves to have the highest entropy possible.
So we were studying these tetrahedra, and it’s the simplest Platonic solid — the simplest three-dimensional shape, right? These Dungeons & Dragons dice. I had an inkling that it would be interesting to look at how they like to arrange with one another based solely on entropy, meaning they had no direct interactions between them — they didn’t want to stick together; there’s no charges; there’s no nothing; there’s just entropy. But I had no idea how interesting. I had no inkling that they would form the kind of structures that they did.
more on quantamagazine.org
