Grown-Up Physicists Piay Serious Games in the Sandbox

摘要

An old adage holds that all problems in physics are either trivial or insoluble. Those categories can actually be near neighbors. Take the bounc-' ing, flowing, mixing, oscillating, avalanching substances called granular materials--of which sand is the most familiar. "Sand," says University of Chicago physicist Heinrich Jaeger, "we associate with something terribly simple. Something whose behavior we can obviously predict. But if we look more closely," says Jaeger, who recently helped organize a conference on granular materials, "we are faced with an unbelievable complexity of outcomes."