It turns out the super-rich getting richer follows the same weird math as swirling water or energy condensing.
March 26, 2026
Original Paper
Dynamical thermalization and turbulence in social stratification models
arXiv · 2603.24190
The Takeaway
Physicists modeled social classes as a network of oscillators and found that wealth naturally 'condenses' into a tiny group of people, mirroring how energy behaves in a gas or how turbulence flows through a liquid. This suggests that the global reality of half the population owning almost nothing may be a predictable outcome of chaotic physical dynamics rather than just random social chance.
From the abstract
We study the nonlinear chaotic dynamics in a system of linear oscillators coupled by social network links with an additional stratification of oscillator energies, or frequencies, and supplementary nonlinear interactions. It is argued that this system can be viewed as a model of social stratification in a society with nonlinear interacting agents with energies playing a role of wealth states of society. The Hamiltonian evolution is characterized by two integrals of motion being energy and probab