Chaos and unpredictability appear to dominate the universe. They also have significant influences on certain everyday processes, making something like how an object breaks after impact seem almost impossible to calculate. To understand this fragmentation process, scientists have tried a number of approaches, from analyzing the microscopic processes of crack propagation to treating the entire process as a “phase transition” when energy reaches a certain threshold that results in imminent fracture.
However, in a new study published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Emmanuel Villermaux from Aix-Marseille University in France took a step back from studying these minute details and instead focused on the broader picture. According to theoretical physicist Ferenc Kun, who wrote an accompanying piece for this new study, Villermaux assumed that fragmentation follows a process of “maximal randomness,” which means that among all possible paths something can break, it will always follow the one that will maximize entropy. He then listed how things can break, from low-entropy (a couple pieces) to higher-entropy (lots of pieces), using a similar process to how physicists derived laws from large assemblages of particles in the 19th century, Villermaux told New Scientist.
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