I baked bread again this weekend, a sourdough wheat. This is something I've been doing now for nearly 20 years, and the magic is still the same. There is this moment when the flour and yeast and salt and sometimes oil and sometimes honey stops...being....that... and starts becoming bread. In between one knead and the next it just feels different in the hands and the magic is almost done. I'm using the term wrong, but it's the same thing as phase transition to me, the transformation from one thing to another. From a computer science standpoint, a phase transition represents an opportunity to solve a problem, as Wikipedia notes:
Phase transitions in intractable computational complexity problems such as NP-complete or PSPACE problems. For example it has been noticed in k-SAT problems that the transition from solvable to unsolvable instances exhibits threshold behavior depending on the ratio of number of clauses to number of variables. Moreover, the amount of computational time required to solve the problem or determine it to be unsolvable increases drastically around the threshold. This line of research comes mostly from investigating similarities between computational complexity and statistical physics.
When you pay attention, the world is filled with phase transitions, hard to easy in a single step, flour to bread, child to adult. The challenge is always in pushing through the time when nothing appears to be changing, and giving enough time for perspective to sink in. Hard problems are rarely solved in a single step, but in time, with many kneads.
I should remember this more.