arXiv:cond-mat/9512055cond-mat
Acoustic Emission from crumpling paper
Early discovery. Linked by one identifiable commenter. This paper is outside the main ranking; a mention is not an endorsement.
Abstract
From magnetic systems to the crust of the earth, many physical systems that exibit a multiplicty of metastable states emit pulses with a broad power law distribution in energy. Digital audio recordings reveal that paper being crumpled, a system that can be easily held in hand, is such a system. Crumpling paper both using the traditional hand method and a novel cylindrical geometry uncovered a power law distribution of pulse energies spanning at least two decades: (exponent 1.3 - 1.6) Crumpling initally flat sheets into a compact ball (strong crumpling), we found little or no evidence that the energy distribution varied systematically over time or the size of the sheet. When we applied repetitive small deformations (weak crumpling) to sheets which had been previously folded along a regular grid, we found no systematic dependence on the grid spacing. Our results suggest that the pulse energy depends only weakly on the size of the paper regions responsible for sound production.
Write them, they can use all the complaints they can get. My first paper was https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9512055v1 which eventually got published in Physical Review E but the abstract for a talk I gave at the March Meeting of the APS caught the eye of a reporter at Science…
PaulHouleView on HNParent context