How Things Break

SEP 01, 1996

Solids fail through the propagation of cracks, whose speed is controlled by instabilities at the smallest scales.

Michael Marder

Jay Fineberg

Galileo Galilei was almost seventy years old, his life nearly shattered by a trial for heresy before the Inquisition, when he retired in 1633 to his villa near Florence to construct the Dialogues Concerning ‘Two New Sciences. His first science was the study of the forces that hold objects together and the conditions that cause them to fall apart—the dialogue taking place in a shipyard, triggered by observations of craftsmen building the Venetian fleet. His second science concerned local motions—laws governing the movement of projectiles.

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More about the authors

Michael Marder, Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, University of Texas, Austin.

Jay Fineberg, Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.