Particles, in many senses, are one of the most vibrant parts of popular and academic culture in 2024. Our video games and movies are marked by how many particles are represented in order to mimic reality. Our science is moved forward by supercomputer models that can sledgehammer through billions of individual points in a simulation. These models allow scientists to combine models from different disciplines and calculate likelihoods rather than certainties.
Real life is also crammed with “particles”—and things that act a surprising amount like particles—that we’re coming to understand more and more. For instance, new research published in the Institute of Physics’ peer-reviewed Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment lays out why the “transition to collective motion”—the catalyst moment where discrete (separate) things with individual directions all turn together and act as one thing—is so hard to pin down.
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