THE kitchen is not the most obvious place to study complexity theory. Yet honey jars may hold the answers to how certain complex patterns emerge in nature.
Mark Buchanan of the University of Oslo, Norway, and Mike Evans at the University of Leeds, UK, noticed that honey flowing down the walls of a jar forms strange and, at first sight, extremely complex patterns. Similar patterns pop up wherever liquids laden with particles flow across surfaces, whether it is sugar crystals in honey, silt in river deltas (see Photo above) or fat particles in yogurt.
To Buchanan’s team, the ubiquity of…
