A closer look
In the 1950s, physics legends Fermi, Pasta, and Ulam (along with the severely undercredited programmer Mary Tsingou) used an early supercomputer to watch energy randomly spread through a vibrating string. They expected the energy to eventually become a messy, uniform blur, as thermodynamics dictates. Instead, the system inexplicably rearranged itself perfectly back into its original starting state. It was a massive slap in the face to statistical mechanics, proving that even mathematical chaos occasionally likes to clean its room.
