Omer Gottesman, bored grad student working on his doctoral thesis at Harvard notices the geometry of crumpled paper and comes up with a theory which predicts complexity and even explains why we do not live forever.
As Mr. Gottesman crumpled, he scanned each sheet into his computer, and then, with an algorithm, he measured the sum total of all the creases. He found that if he crumpled two separate sheets, each sheet would, as expected, accumulate damage in a unique way. But the total crease lengths of the two sheets stayed remarkably similar. Length seemed to be a deterministic variable, a so-called state variable, predicting how the network of creases would evolve.
“The detailed history of the crumpling dynamics is written into the intricate pattern of creases,” Mr. Gottesman and his co-authors wrote. “No two crumpled sheets are identical.”
And yet the paper is effectively devoid of memory. At each state of crumple, the intricate crease patterns, and the events that led to them, are irrelevant. All that is needed to predict the paper’s next state is the total length of creases in the current one. “You just care about the current state,” Mr. Gottesman said.
A single-state philosophy
The news that crumpled paper obeys a state variable — or a crease law, or a damage law — has been received in the academy with wonderment and delight, since, as the authors noted, it represented “a remarkable reduction in complexity.”
Iron in the Sand 