Manny's picture: a free‑flowing whirlpool that clogs below a critical push — and the real data
shows exactly such a threshold, g†. So we ran the honest test: drive particles through a bottleneck and sweep the
push. The humble result — in this simple model no sharp threshold emerges. Flow is proportional to the drive; the
clog is gradual, not a switch. That's worth knowing: g† is not free — it demands deeper physics than a funnel.
What you're seeing. Particles are pushed rightward through a funnel, repelling one another like a crowd. At high drive they
stream; at low drive they crawl and slow — but they never truly jam. The right panel plots the toy's flow vs drive as you
sweep: it comes out a near-straight line — proportional, no knee — next to the sharp
knee the real universe shows.
The honest result (I verified this off-screen). I ran this exact physics headless and swept both the drive and the crowd
density: throughput stays proportional in every case — no threshold emerges. Soft, overdamped particles can't build the
load-bearing arches that make a real clog; that needs genuine granular contact + friction, or new physics (MOND's fundamental
scale, ΛCDM feedback…). So the clog is a beautiful metaphor that a naïve simulation does not reproduce — and that's the
valuable part: it shows exactly where the mystery lives. There's a Zen in testing your own idea and letting the answer be what
it is. The rest of this site earns its striking claims by reporting the honest ones too.