The 2021 Ig Nobel prize may have been remote, but it wasn’t remotely the least interesting. There were a plethora of interesting scientific works in the prizes [1]. Particularly interesting for me was the prize for physics and kinetic, which were related. These prizes were for attempting to understand how human crowds self-organize.

The physics prize [2] looked at modeling human crowds and showed that by tracking actual human interactions that we can be described quite well with simple long-range (sight) and short-range interaction terms. Using this fluid dynamics approach they showed good agreement in describing real interactions. The same group previously attempted to direct pedestrians but was not very successful [3], suggesting we still need to develop how to introduce external forces.

The kinetics prize [4] was given for investigating the effect of people on phones in crowds. No shocker here, they are the worst and slow everyone down. But it is still important to understand how this happens if we wish to potentially minimize the effects.

If you prefer to read some popular science articles on these topics you can check out these from phys.org [5,6]


0:00 - Intro
0:55 - Physics prize
2:50 - Directing pedestrians with light
4:04 - Kinetics prize (mobile phones)


[1] www.improbable.com
[2] journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.98.062310
[3] collective-dynamics.eu/index.php/cod/article/view/A34
[4] www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe7758
[5] phys.org/news/2018-12-pedestrians-cm-comfort-zone-collisions.html
[6] phys.org/news/2021-03-distracted-pedestrians-people.html

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