ABSTRACT
Living matter can assemble itself and function with no direction from without, and surprisingly little from within. The solid earth quakes without warning, and one can walk on sand and yet pour and stir it like a liquid. It seems unlikely that we will ever understand these examples in quite the same way that we understand a helium atom or even a bottle of helium gas, even though they all obey the same known laws of physics. But fields like non-linear, fluid, granular, and soft matter physics use physical reasoning to help make sense of the world’s complexity and surprises. Large deformations can in turn bring out the non-linear properties of matter such as buckling, creasing, fracture, and transitions from rigid to flowing. And by being larger and slower than the structures and dynamics of atoms and small molecules, mesoscopic physics can be easier to observe and manipulate.
