Thursday, April 26, 2012

Freezing glass may shed light on a great mystery in mathematics

Freezing glass may shed light on a great mystery in mathematics: In glasses, atoms are freeze solid, arranged in a disorderly manner, while in crystals, they are arrayed in an orderly fashion. The way energy is distributed within disordered systems like glasses resembles a random landscape of hills and valleys. As the amount of energy within such a system is lowered, any travelers navigating this landscape would slow and eventually stop. The areas in which they would tend to freeze in place resemble the way numbers cluster with the Riemann zeta function.

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