How Physics Could Make Big Crowds Safer
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Conductor Robert Frahn says a good melody captures our attention.
And then it moves you through time. Music is architecture in time. If you engage in the moment with what you're listening to, you do lose a sense of the time around you.
How we experience time. That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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Thank you. Hi, guys. Hi, Elsa. Okay, so give me my science presence this week. What do you have for me today?
We got you. Okay, so we're going to talk about how the physics of fluids can help crowd control. How our mood may be better in the morning. And a fossil that might shed light on the early ancestors of modern birds.
Okay, I'm a little bit skeptical about the second one, but very excited to hear what you guys have to say.
I'm a morning person. You might hate me now. Okay. All that on this episode of Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.
All right, Gina, I want to start with how crowds of people can act like fluids. Yes. What?
I mean, this is physics, so I love it. Okay, so this is really clear in this video of a crowd around 5,000 people during the San Fermin Festival in Pamplona, Spain. And this is a gathering the day before the Running of the Bulls. Okay, do you want to see?
Yeah. Okay, check it out. Whoa, it's like the crowd's undulating. Yeah, yeah. Like red water. They're like all dressed in red or they're waving red things.
Yeah, they're waving red handkerchiefs. And this is a video from a rooftop. And you can like really see that dense crowd. The density of this crowd is comparable to like putting 900 people in a one-bedroom apartment. And they are. They're like kind of moving like water. Which sounds kind of unsafe looking at this. What's interesting about this gathering in Spain is that it's actually known to be very safe. Yeah. even though there are so many people. But you may remember the Astroworld Festival in Houston in 2021. There, 10 fans died in a crowd crush. So scientists want to understand what went wrong and how can we keep people safe in crowds.
Dance crowds by themselves are not dangerous. So what's very dangerous when you're in a dance crowd is to be close to rigid walls. You want to be in the bulk. Do not go to the boundaries. Stay away from the walls. Stay in the bulk. OK, what does that mean, Regina?
Yeah. So this is some like crowd management advice from Dennis Bartolo. He's a physicist at the Institutes of Advanced Education in Lyon, France. And he and his colleagues wanted to learn more about the factors that can turn crowds dangerous, specifically those spontaneous movements of like dense crowds. So his team studied this Spanish festival crowd during four separate years.
And what did they find?
Yeah, so in the past, they thought that crowd movements were random or chaotic. But Dennis and his team broke down the physics of the fluctuations and modeled the crowd. And for the first time, they found that dense crowds followed recurring, predictable patterns, like clumping together and swaying.
And because these spontaneous motions are periodic in time, they are very easy to detect. And they are very easy to detect very early on, before they become dangerous.
They wrote about this in the journal Nature. So the hope is that authorities can monitor and then intervene if a crowd starts exhibiting this kind of like periodic behavior. Being able to monitor how a dense crowd moves brings us one step closer to figuring out what to do when it gets dangerous.
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