Scientists Discovered a Secret World Where Particles Turn Chaos Into Order

In new research, scientists find that flocks of birds may become ordered after a disordered start.
The way flocks and other “collective motions” form has eluded scientists for a long time.
Understanding physics this way could help us understand trends in the human body’s cells.

Particles, in many senses, are one of the most vibrant parts of popular and academic culture in 2024. Our video games and movies are marked by how many particles are represented in order to mimic reality. Our science is moved forward by supercomputer models that can sledgehammer through billions of individual points in a simulation. These models allow scientists to combine models from different disciplines and calculate likelihoods rather than certainties.

Real life is also crammed with “particles”—and things that act a surprising amount like particles—that we’re coming to understand more and more. For instance, new research published in the Institute of Physics’ peer-reviewed Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment lays out why the “transition to collective motion”—the catalyst moment where discrete (separate) things with individual directions all turn together and act as one thing—is so hard to pin down.

Collective motion is a well-known phenomenon of particle physics, but it’s not exclusive to the micro-realm. Fish, for example, are icons of collective motion, and scientists believe that their sophisticated ability to change direction is a result of better sensory organs and sharper senses than we previously thought. But that doesn’t completely explain the physics of how the groups stay orderly, respond in shockingly fast ways, and group up in the first place.




Is a flock of birds the same as the plasma inside a nuclear fusion tokamak reactor in some ways? The answer, fascinatingly, is yes. And both show qualities shared by fluids like water and wind. It’s the why behind these similarities that’s still contested. How can it be that “self-propelled” things—like fish, birds, individual cells, and even magnets—model the same physical ideas as particles?




In a statement from the SISSA Lab in Italy, Julien Tailleur of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said that his professional curiosity about this topic dates back to an observation made by fellow scientist Hugues Chaté 20 years ago—that group responses of magnetic particles are dependent on pressure and temperature. As scientists observed fish and birds, they thought something like this property of magnetism could explain how those groups form as well. Within the right parameters, the magnetized particles behave in an orderly way, and animals certainly look orderly as they change, group, and regroup.


But in this new experiment, the scientists found that, instead, these groups pivoted based on fluctuations.

In statistical mechanics—a field that studies large groups, like bodies of water molecules, using methods from probability and statistics—fluctuation is a specific formula that shows the rise of entropy (propensity for disorder) in a system like a flock of birds or a bloodstream. This entropy comes in forms like “noise,” which (in this case) is just a variable for what affects one part of a flock or system in order to create change. In their experimental setup, even magnets responded to the noise in a discontinuous, or less orderly, way that led to an orderly grouping. Despite the outcome of a neat flock or grouping, the catalyst to move into those groups was disordered.

The finding was not true of all the models that the scientists tested. But it did end up applying even to what seem like much more complex scenarios—like pigeons that group based on what they can see and mentally compute, rather than through their other

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