🚀 go-pugleaf

The property is called thixotropism, and a substance possessing said
property is thixotropic.  This means that it changes its ductility and
resistance to pressure depending on the speed of the force applied to it. 

Another way of looking at it is that it will behave like a solid or like a
liquid depending on the time-scale in which you are interacting with it.
Many substances are thixotropic, in this view.  Glass shatters like -- well,
glass -- if you hit it with a rock; but over centuries, panes of glass will
start to flow and sag out of their frames.  Over tens of millenia, rock will
flow like liquid.  On the other hand, water, our archetype of liquids,
behaves a great deal like concrete if you hit it head first at terminal
velocity off the top of the Golden Gate Bridge.

In the mixture you describe, the transition from "solid" to "liquid"
behavior is particularly abrupt, and happens within the range of
accelerations that unaided human muscles can generate, and the range of
timeframes that unaided human perceptions can observe.  

A final observation: Rush hour traffic is thixotropic.

I have been looking for an opportunity to use the preceding sentence for
at least two months, and you handed it to me on a platter.  Thank you.
  -- Clifton

--
cliftonr@netcom.com     Home: +1 808 521 9073  Work: +1 808 625 3234
Clifton Royston, Pope of the Church of the Subgenius in Paradise
- Dissecting personal psychopathology at the edge of the 20th century -