IS THERE any order in a pile of sand? A team of physicists thinks so. They
told the American Physical Society meeting in Seattle last week that apparently
jumbled-up grains of sand are actually trying to arrange themselves into a
four-dimensional sphere.
Physicists have been playing with sand piles for years. They hope that their
piles —actually large collections of hard spheres—will provide a
window into disordered systems, such as the arrangement of molecules in glass.
Physicists would like to know if the apparent disorder in sand piles masks some
deeper structure. In particular, they would like to know…
