Lining Yao and Hashika Jain. The Confluence of Geometry and Hidden Forces. Book Chapter. Birkhäuser. 2023. PDF | Amazon

An Invited Book Chapter for the General Public

Matter is not always static; matter can morph. Cells divide, leaves grow, octopuses transform, robots reconfigure, bread rises, and pasta swells. Once we start to observe the physical world through a lens with temporal and spatial dimensions, we see a morphing reality.

Morphing Matter is an interplay of geometry and hidden forces. To compute, design, and fabricate morphing mechanisms that leverage both geometrical and physical knowledge of materials, we need to unfold the marriage of geometry and forces such as a conformal map of interconnected beams shrinking and fighting for the lowest entropy, a frustum-shaped groove with interfering disks swelling at differential diffusion rates, and a triangulated filler path affecting spacer fabric deforming with biased shear forces. Novel morphing mechanisms and applications like self-assembling furniture, crawling soft robots, and morphing pasta also materialise due to this marriage.