There's a classic physics toy model called the
Ising model, where you have a big grid, and at each site on the grid you have a cell that can be either 'spin up' or 'spin down'. Think of it like a clock that can be either at 12 or 6, for the moment. A cell's energy is determined by the spins of all the adjacent cells. Cells 'like' being near other cells with the same spin, in the sense that it gives them a lower potential energy; things in general want to be in their lowest possible energy state i.e. things fall down as far as they can go. Obviously the lowest possible energy state would be for all cells to have the same spin.
Then we turn on finite temperature, so that there are random fluctuations of energy in the system that can sometimes kick a cell into a higher energy state. At low temperatures, things
mostly like being in the same spin as their neighbors, but there's some random fluctuation in there, too. At high temperature, the fluctuations are so large that the spins are basically random.
Now, you can take the Ising model and extend it a little further, to something called the
Potts model, so rather than clocks at each site pointing to either 12 or 6, they can point at
N different spots on the clock. The energy is still determined by the spins of the adjacent cells, but the energy is determined by how aligned the spins are. A clock pointing at 4 wants to line up with other clocks pointing at 4, but a clock pointing at 3 or 5 is almost as good.
So anyways, if you give the different spins different colors, you can see patches of same-spin cells emerge at low temperature, and you also get these fun features called vortices, where all the different spins as you go around the clock meet at a single point.