Homeward Bound

An apt description of crawling home after a long night of bar hopping might be, Wandering Home in Many Dimensions: Making Sense of Chaos. But in this case, it is the title of a lecture about the mysterious journey of sodium chloride particles into precise crystalline formations, bypassing the trillions (literally) of other options these particles have of becoming ordinary, molecularly-messy, glass. It’s as though atoms want to arrive at a state of beauty.