Sand and the science of granularity
Jun 27th, 2009 by ethicalimpact
Science has been looking at falling sand. It seems that tiny particles act a lot like water. Wired Science has neat videos that show this in action.
One of my more treasured memories was of taking a drive into the mountains in Boulder, Colorado. As I made a turn I came out overlooking a meadow that was edged by pine forest. As I watched a herd of elk ‘poured’ out of the forest onto the meadow floor. a truly awesome sight! 
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I wonder how this applies to organizations - to groups of people going into and out of events, to the neurons in our brain when we do many things at once (like playing music and singing). I wonder what this not quite solid and not quite liquid dynamic can tell us about culture, how it ebbs and flows. What would we see if we could think of our thoughts and beliefs as grains of sand? Physicist Heinrich Jaeger of the University of Chicago,… sees in granularity a potentially universal dynamic, reflected in everything from highway traffic to crowd patterns to ecosystem function.
Heady stuff.
