It's the sort of physics advance that Sauron might appreciate. The villain in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, gives the kings of men, elves, and dwarves magic rings, but then forges a single ring that controls all the others. In a similar way, a duo of theoretical physicists has come up with a way to transform all the disparate members of a vast family of complex systems known as spin models into different shades of a single simple model, which now serves as the one to rule them all.
That "Ising model" is the simplest spin model and already has a legendary history. The advance could have implications well beyond physics, as spin models have been used to simulate everything from stock markets to protein folding. "I find it pretty shocking," says David Perez, a mathematician at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), who was not involved with the work. "What is surprising is not that there is a universal model, but that it is so simple."
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