by Adwaith.B.S(2016-2019)
adwaithbalachandran123@gmail.com
Solids and liquids are well understood. But some materials act like both a liquid and a solid, making their behaviour hard to predict. Sand is one example. A grain of sand is as solid as a rock, but a million grains can flow through a funnel almost like water. And highway traffic can behave in a similar way, flowing freely until it becomes blocked at some bottleneck.
So a better understanding of this “gray zone” might have important practical applications.
“People have been asking, under what conditions does the entire system jam up or clog?” says Dr. Kerstin Nordstrom, a physicist at Mount Holyoke College. “What are the crucial parameters to avoid clogging?” Weirdly, an obstruction in the flow of traffic can, under certain conditions, actually reduce traffic jams. “It’s very counter intuitive,” she says.
Syzygy 