“We made what I would consider a ridiculously strict prediction: When that number is equal to 3.81 or below, the tissue is a solid, and when that number is above 3.81, that tissue is a fluid,” Manning said. “I asked Jeff Fredberg to go look at this, and he did, and it worked perfectly.”
Fredberg saw that lung cells with a shape index above 3.81 started to mobilize and squeeze past each other. Manning’s prediction “came out of pure theory, pure thought,” he said. “It’s really an astounding validation of a physical theory.”