  Self-buckling is an interesting phenomenon that is easily found around us,
either in nature or in objects made by human. Palm fronds which initially
directed upward when they were short and turned into bending after appreciably
longer is an example of the self-buckling phenomenon. We report here that the
self-buckling of columns can be treated as a process of second order phase
transition by considering the straight column as disorder state, the bending
column as order state, and the temperature as the inverse of column length. The
critical temperature corresponds to the inverse of critical length for
buckling, 1/Lcr, and the deviation angle made by column free end relative to
vertical direction satisfies a scaling relationship with a scaling power of
0.485. Changing of the column geometry from the vertically upward to the
bending state can be considered as a transition from disorder state to order
state.
