When David Srolovitz and Robert MacPherson went to a Princeton pub last week, they weren't just two Jersey guys going out for a beer. They saw the creamy foam through the cold eye of science.
The two had just published a paper in the British journal Nature about the behavior of foam, ceramics and other "three-dimensional microstructures" - offering a solution to a problem that has stymied materials scientists for 50 years.
It is well known that such networks of bubbles, grains or cells tend to become "coarser" over time: some cells become larger, while others shrink and eventually disappear.
