Glass Rules Everything Around Me
Glass Rules Everything Around Me
The great successes of modern physics have been reductionist. Equilibrium systems are understood by breaking them into ever smaller and simpler component parts. But the properties of a grain of sand do not determine the properties of the sand pile, nor do the atomic properties of silica determine those of window glass. Rather, all of the interesting behavior arises from the complex geometry of the many interacting pieces: the fundamental physics exists only at the scale of many particles (and indeed the properties of the constituent parts is all but immaterial). In this talk I will provide an overview of our successes with the recently developed Replica Theory of Jamming as well as offer a broad outlook for the future with the eventual goal of cracking the glass transition problem.