The Emergence of Order in Flexible Beam Clusters.

A study on the behavior of compressed elastic beams shows that the emergence of order is determined by geometry, not complex forces. The researchers fixed flexible plastic beams vertically between two horizontal plates and squeezed them together, causing the beams to bend and come into contact with one another. The order increased with compression and depended mainly on the ratio of the uncompressed beam height to the compressed beam height. The researchers also observed a set of phenomena that seemed to govern the emergence of order, including "clump-hole annihilation." The results could be useful for designing flexible materials and understanding interactions among flexible structures in nature.