Nucleation in physical and nonphysical systems

The aggregation of particles out of an initially homogeneous situation is well known in physics. Depending on the system under consideration and its control parameters, the cluster formation in a supersaturated (metastable or unstable) situation has been observed in nucleation physics as well as in other branches. We investigate the well-known example of condensation (formation of liquid droplets) in an undercooled vapour to conclude that the formation of bound states as a phase transition is related to transportation science. We present a comparison of nucleation in an isothermal–isochoric container with traffic congestion on a circular one-lane freeway. The analysis is based, in both cases, on the probabilistic description by stochastic master equations.