I always marvel at Quanta’s skill in trying to translate these intricate mathematical and physical ideas for a broad audience. I can’t always wrap my mind around their analogies, but I always admire their effort.

Their visualizations seemed especially helpful here. I am curious, though-they allude to this discovery relating to modeling phenomena like fluid perfusing porous materials. Are precise values of constants like this “backbone exponent” a practical barrier to that sort of modeling, or is this a more basic discovery that’s satisfying just in the sense of the completeness of human knowledge?