Up close, many systems look chaotic — clusters of stars, the atoms in superfluid helium, the haphazard arrangement of certain subatomic particles. Zoom out, though, and they appear organized. They possess a “hidden order,” says Salvatore Torquato, a Princeton theoretical scientist who discovered this phenomenon a decade ago, calling it “hyperuniform and disordered.”
Recently, neuroscientist Joseph Corbo of Washington University in St. Louis came to Torquato with a biological puzzle. In their beady eyes, chickens have five kinds of cones — cells that help perceive color (humans have three) — tightly packed into a small space. Corbo wondered why the cells were ordered, but not perfectly ordered. What was he missing? Together, he and Torquato found, the cones’ tight arrangement is actually hyperuniform and disordered. “However,” says Torquato, “it also came with a twist.”
When Torquato looked at just one kind of cone at a time, he found these, too, ...
