Ever wonder why you can never get something back into the package it came out of ? I can never get all of Christmas lights back in the box. No matter how hard I try. Well, guess what it's science, well...physics that is(sort of). If you carefully stack equal-sized marbles in a box, they will fill about 74% of its volume. Yet, if you dump them willy nilly into the box, they won't fill up more than about 64%. Honestly, no joke, no matter how much you shake the box or pound on it. Researchers have studied and measured this "random close packing" limit. No one for years could explain the phenomenon. Recently, a Russian team of researchers reports in the June Physical Review Letters that the "random close packing" limit is met each time all the marbles form tiny pyramid shapes. These pyramid shapes take up more space than the stacking does. The Russian study, many scientist postulate is a good starting point for describing the random, close-packed state mathematically, and may even help to explain why disordered solids called glasses freeze in a liquid-like state instead of forming a crystal. Modern researchers are not the first to explore this reasoning in 1611, Johannes Kepler estimated that crystalline objects couldn't be packed more densely than 74%. It took the next hundred years or so for scientists to discover and understand why. (http://focus.aps.org/story/v19/st18)
2 comments:
Wow...I never thought of it that way. At least now I have a scientific reason for bulging boxes. :)
So so true... I love the fact that you write what people think
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