Pure phase
The common theme for my weekend seems to have been phase transitions.
Firstly I got hooked on this dynamic traffic simulation. I wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to discover tipping points for traffic jams.
I blame Mat Webb’s Interconnected, which also led me here. And in particular here. The theme was set.
Next up, I spent the afternoon in East London watching West Ham take on Manchester City in the FA Cup. It ended up being a pretty drab affair, largely because it lacked any creative players (or at least creative play). With no player willing or able to inject anything extraordinary, the match became disappointingly stale and predictable. What I and thirty three thousand other spectators really needed was something to subvert the unimaginative patterns the game had fallen in to. Someone or something that could move it towards a critical point. This proved to be wishful thinking on my part and the game ended as it began: nil nil.
To give all this pretentious nonsense some context, I should probably mention that I’m currently reading Philip Ball’s Critical Mass. I’ve just got to the part in which Ball explains that phase transitions can be considered generic phenomena:
“It is surprising enough that two different fluids, such as carbon dioxide or methane, which have quite different critical temperatures, should approach their critical points at the same relative (that is, percentage) terms. It is baffling that two wholly different kinds of system – a fluid and a magnet – also display this universality. What this suggests is that phase transitions are generic phenomena: they happen in the same way for a wide range of apparently different systems.
So why not traffic and football? In fact, Ball ends up drawing one such parallel:
“Every traffic jam involves a different set of vehicles and circumstances, but there are features that are common to them all.”
I read this on Sunday night and so brought an end to my weekend of (seeing) phase transitions (where there were none).