Dear colleagues,
this Wednesday we have a colloquium about
Kinematics, Equilibrium and Shape
by L.A. Bunimovich Georgia Institute. of Technology
"Consider a gas of N identical particles inside a container. Then we would expect that after a sufficiently long time the particles will occupy the entire container and will be distributed there uniformly. A goal of this talk is to demonstrate that both these expectations are generically not true. This seems to contradict to the basic principles of statistical mechanics, but, in fact, it does not. This effect of the container's shape is likely to be observable in a lab."
See also http://www.physik.unizh.ch/teaching/kolloquium.html for details.