Speaker 1: Welcome to Creature, feature production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Speaker 1: your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology
Speaker 1: and evolutionary biology, and today on the show cyclones, swarms
Speaker 1: and murmurations or zooming way out and looking at animals
Speaker 1: not as individuals but as herds, colonies, crowds, and flocks.
Speaker 1: And we're going to find out that animals, including human animals,
Speaker 1: share more in common with particles found in physics than
Speaker 1: we may like to believe. Discover this and more as
Speaker 1: we answer the age old question when doesn't aunt mosh
Speaker 1: pit get deadly? Joining me today to talk about the
Speaker 1: particle physics of bugs, reindeer, birds, and humans is particle
Speaker 1: physicist and co host of Daniel and Jorge Explained the
Speaker 1: universe Daniel Whitson, Welcome, Hi, Katie. Think very much, but
Speaker 1: I have to admit it's been a long time since
Speaker 1: I've been in a mosh pit with humans, particles or ants.
Speaker 1: Is that all right? That is okay. I'm a fan
Speaker 1: of metal, but I've never been in a mash pit
Speaker 1: because it terrifies me. So I have spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time in Europe driving in circles in one of
Speaker 1: those roundabout yes, the cyclone. It's called the American trap here.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited to have you on for this episode
Speaker 1: because it's one of those times where usually I kind
Speaker 1: of focus on the individual animals behavior, their biology. Maybe
Speaker 1: when I zoom out, I'm kind of talking about evolution,
Speaker 1: but in this case, it's looking at groups of animals
Speaker 1: and what happens when you have this massive swarm or
Speaker 1: a flock or herd, and how animals start to behave
Speaker 1: in ways that can be eerily un animal like and
Speaker 1: more like a particle, even like sub atomic part of
Speaker 1: holes or or elementary particles. And it's it's I think
Speaker 1: it's fascinating and a little spooky. Yeah. Well, one of
Speaker 1: the amazing things that happens in physics is that you
Speaker 1: have these tiny little particles which have certain behaviors, but
Speaker 1: then when you get a lot of them together a thousand,
Speaker 1: a million, ten to the twenty seven, new behaviors emerge.
Speaker 1: You know, you get things like phases, liquids and crystals
Speaker 1: and gases and plasmas that can do all sorts of
Speaker 1: crazy things that particles themselves can't do. So I'm very
Speaker 1: excited if we are now talking about emerging properties of animals,
Speaker 1: or we're gonna be talking about like liquid ants and
Speaker 1: crystals of reindeers and stuff like that pretty much. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: animals have extremely interesting behaviors as individuals. But what happens
Speaker 1: when individuals get together as a group. There's something very strange.
Speaker 1: You get these group dynamics where the individual becomes part
Speaker 1: of a larger whole, like a single molecule in a
Speaker 1: stream of water. Er and the ways that groups of
Speaker 1: animals behave, such as herds, flock, swarms, and even human crowds,
Speaker 1: is uncannily like water or a fluid or even a gas.
Speaker 1: It acts like it is a new thing, not just
Speaker 1: a group of something like reindeer, but a new phenomenon
Speaker 1: that is much greater than each individual reindeer, which is
Speaker 1: I suppose very inspiring speech to reindeer. But yeah, that
Speaker 1: is what we are talking about right now. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about cyclones. So a weather cyclone forms when a core
Speaker 1: of low atmospheric pressure causes the air currents to basically
Speaker 1: like swirl around it kind of like water going down
Speaker 1: a drain. But there are all sorts of cyclone like
Speaker 1: activity in the universe. Uh, what I mean I am
Speaker 1: not a physicist, so maybe this is wrong, but it
Speaker 1: seems like the Milky Way kind of circles around a center,
Speaker 1: like a big, very slow, but very huge cyclone. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: the cyclones are everywhere in the universe. It's super fascinating.
Speaker 1: And it's typically, as you say, you have some low
Speaker 1: pressure region or some force pulling you towards the center.
Speaker 1: So in the case of a hurricane, you have like
Speaker 1: warm water in the ocean which heats and moistens up
Speaker 1: the air above it, which rises and creates this low
Speaker 1: pressure center and things rush in. And you might wonder like, well,
Speaker 1: why does a hurricane spin. Why doesn't everything just float
Speaker 1: towards the center in straight lines, And the answer is
Speaker 1: that the Earth spins, and this creates this weird effect,
Speaker 1: this corioles effect, because winds at different latitudes are traveling
Speaker 1: at different speeds, and so, for example, the equator is
Speaker 1: traveling faster than other latitudes just because it's further away
Speaker 1: from the axis of the Earth. And so if you
Speaker 1: have something which is on the same scale as the Earth,
Speaker 1: then you know particles moving away from the equator are faster,
Speaker 1: and that makes the whole thing spin, which means that
Speaker 1: on the other side of the Earth, they actually do
Speaker 1: spin the opposite direction. It's not true that if you
Speaker 1: flush your toilet in Australia it spins the other way.
Speaker 1: But cyclones really do spin the other way on the
Speaker 1: southern hemisphere. So a really big toilet, maybe it would
Speaker 1: spin the other direction. Come on, Australia, you just called
Speaker 1: I think you just called Australia a big toilet. Oh no,
Speaker 1: I would never It's more like a giant Petrie dish
Speaker 1: filled with the most dangerous animals in the world. But
Speaker 1: I love I love you Australia, I really do. And
Speaker 1: it's not something that's limited to Earth. We see cyclones
Speaker 1: on Mars and dust storms. There are cyclones on Saturn.
Speaker 1: You know, the Great Red Spot is like the biggest
Speaker 1: storm in the Solar System. That's a cyclone. So you're right,
Speaker 1: this sort of swarthy behavior is all over the universe
Speaker 1: and also in animals as well. So, uh, the first
Speaker 1: thing that we're going to talk about is actually we're
Speaker 1: starting with a very small animal, one of the you know,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say one of the smallest animals, because of
Speaker 1: course there are so many teeny tiny microscopic animals but
Speaker 1: we're talking about ants. So uh, there is something called
Speaker 1: an ant mill or death spiral, which I'll let you
Speaker 1: decide which one would be the better metal band album name.
Speaker 1: But what this looks like is a spiral of ants, uh,
Speaker 1: circling around and around. Usually there's like a pile of
Speaker 1: collapsed ants in the center. It's like this moustrum, like
Speaker 1: this hurricane of ants. And they can basically do this
Speaker 1: behavior until they die. So they form this cyclone and
Speaker 1: keep walking around and around until they collapse and die
Speaker 1: of exhaust gin. And this raises the question of like,
Speaker 1: good God, why would they do this? So our aunts
Speaker 1: really just like little mental robots that will follow the
Speaker 1: instructions from pheromones even to their death pretty much. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting because aunt colonies are quite intelligent each individual aunt.
Speaker 1: While I hesitate to call any animal like stupid, they
Speaker 1: it's not so much that they're stupid, but they depend
Speaker 1: on a set of rules guided by their sensory abilities,
Speaker 1: and they will they simply lack the perspective to know
Speaker 1: that they are in a death spiral. So the key
Speaker 1: thing is that this isn't just any ant that will
Speaker 1: do this. This is done specifically by army ants. So
Speaker 1: army ants, also known as legionary ants, is a name
Speaker 1: for over two hundred species of ants. They are related
Speaker 1: and they all show similar behaviors, although it's thought that
Speaker 1: these behaviors may have evolved many different times in a
Speaker 1: case of massive parallel evolution, which is always really fascinating
Speaker 1: because if you have related animals and they're very similar
Speaker 1: and they have similar behaviors, you assume that they it's
Speaker 1: basically a tree branching off evolutionarily, instead of basically having
Speaker 1: like many many different types of individual parallel evolution without
Speaker 1: necessarily all sort of flowing along the same evolutionary path. Well,
Speaker 1: I think you said something really interesting a minute ago
Speaker 1: about how behavior emerges in ants, that the individual ants
Speaker 1: are kind of dumb, but together they can be smart.
Speaker 1: I think that's just another example of this like emergent phenomena,
Speaker 1: where the individual pieces are doing one thing, but together
Speaker 1: they're doing something really qualitatively totally different. Like our neurons
Speaker 1: individually are not that smart, and some of them can
Speaker 1: make decisions that lead you to your death, you know,
Speaker 1: press the metal, press the pedal to the metal on
Speaker 1: the highway or something, but collectively we do have some intelligence.
Speaker 1: So that's interesting that ants can have both intelligence emerge
Speaker 1: and also these weird death spirals emerge. Yeah, yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It's definitely a double edged toward this group behavior. It
Speaker 1: can lead to an emergent greater intelligence, but it can
Speaker 1: also lack the perspective that allows them to see basically, oh,
Speaker 1: this is a bad situation, and so why doesn't this
Speaker 1: die out evolutionarily? Like, if this leads to mass death
Speaker 1: of them, you think that they wouldn't propagate this behavior. Well,
Speaker 1: that's what's interesting is because typically the very things that
Speaker 1: make them such a successful species and typical circumstances is
Speaker 1: what occasionally will lead them to this death spiral. So
Speaker 1: army ants, like any other kind of aunt, have hierarchical you,
Speaker 1: so colonies they have a single queen, worker ants and
Speaker 1: soldier ants. These are all females, and the soldier ants
Speaker 1: are like these beefy ants with large mandibles. The only
Speaker 1: male ants in the colony are there for reproduction. They
Speaker 1: have wings, tubby bodies, and in fact they're called sausage
Speaker 1: ants because entomologists are really judgmental. It's it's very funny
Speaker 1: to me. It's like you have the worker ants and
Speaker 1: the soldier is and the sausage ants and near Chicago
Speaker 1: or they called sassage sassage ants. Yeah, man, I don't
Speaker 1: put anything but mustard on your sassage ants. Nice little
Speaker 1: sassage ant sandwich. What what would That's not what? They
Speaker 1: don't call them sausage sandwiches in Chicago sassage sandwich is
Speaker 1: like uh. Another key trait of army ants is that
Speaker 1: they are nomadic. So when you think of ants, you
Speaker 1: typically think of an ant hill, a colony. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: in a hill, maybe it's in a dead log, maybe
Speaker 1: it's in your cereal in your kitchen, but it is
Speaker 1: one location that the ants stay in. They will build
Speaker 1: their nests and tunnels and it's really fascinating. But army
Speaker 1: ants don't do this. They are purely nomadic. Instead of
Speaker 1: having a single home like an ant hill where they live,
Speaker 1: they continuously roam, forming large migratory rivers of ants. Wow,
Speaker 1: that sounds like a nightmare of ants. It is actually
Speaker 1: for anything that gets in its path. It is a
Speaker 1: true nightmare. So infamously, these rivers of army ants will
Speaker 1: take down any animal in its path small enough to
Speaker 1: fall victim, to the voracious troops of pillaging ants. Now
Speaker 1: I say small enough because like, these ants aren't going
Speaker 1: to take down say like a deer, but uh, they
Speaker 1: can take down things that are much bigger than themselves.
Speaker 1: So things like grasshoppers, scorpions, spiders, giant beetles, anything that
Speaker 1: is able to become basically overwhelmed by these ants in
Speaker 1: a matter of just a couple of minutes, like they
Speaker 1: will be taken down and broken down by these ants.
Speaker 1: I imagine I could be overwhelmed if I was swarmed
Speaker 1: with ants. It doesn't seem impossible to me if you
Speaker 1: The thing is, though, as a human you start to
Speaker 1: get bitten by these little ants and you go out
Speaker 1: and you move away and swat your leg and you're
Speaker 1: all right. Annoying, yes, but unlikely to kill you. Now,
Speaker 1: if someone like tied you down, I guess, like a
Speaker 1: damsel on railroad tracks, and then like set you in
Speaker 1: the path of army ants and you could not move,
Speaker 1: I would imagine that, yes, you may be in a
Speaker 1: bit of trouble. Well, that's not a typical weekend activity
Speaker 1: for me, so I have to worry. But I did
Speaker 1: once have a brush with a river of ants in
Speaker 1: real life, no joke. We have these tiny little ants
Speaker 1: near my house in southern California, and one time, before
Speaker 1: giving my son a bath, I turned on the water
Speaker 1: and this river of ant poured out of the faucet.
Speaker 1: They must have been like climbing up the pipes. It
Speaker 1: must have been thousands and thousands of them. I was
Speaker 1: just so glad that I hadn't put my son in
Speaker 1: the bathtub before turning on the water. That's like, that's
Speaker 1: like a horror movie where you turn on the faucet
Speaker 1: and a bunch of spiders come out. This time a
Speaker 1: bunch of ants coming out. Wow, that's incredible. This is
Speaker 1: what happens when you encroach on nature in the southern
Speaker 1: California suburbs. Yes, these army ants really do behave like
Speaker 1: an army that will go around pillaging and destroying everything
Speaker 1: in their path. And what's interesting is they don't really
Speaker 1: follow a single leader, but they follow the pheromone trails
Speaker 1: of their comrades. So if enough ants become interested in
Speaker 1: a target like an insect that they want to eat,
Speaker 1: others will follow that trail. And in as each one
Speaker 1: follows that trail, they are also depositing pheromones, so that
Speaker 1: trail gets stronger. You mentioned neurons earlier, which I think
Speaker 1: is really interesting because neural pathways work in a very
Speaker 1: similar way. You can strengthen neural pathways by using them,
Speaker 1: like repeating them. So like with these ants, if you
Speaker 1: think of these ants and the pheromones is like neurotransmitters.
Speaker 1: The more they go along the same path, the stronger
Speaker 1: that path becomes, the more likely other ants are going
Speaker 1: to join them on That path just compounds on itself exactly.
Speaker 1: And so another thing that is troubling for these ants
Speaker 1: is that army ants are typically nearly blind, so these
Speaker 1: pheromone trails are vital for them to group together. It
Speaker 1: is they're basically they're only means of pathing, of of
Speaker 1: forging a path forward, and that is what leads them
Speaker 1: to their doom in these death spirals. So you know,
Speaker 1: do you remember that game Snake. It would be on
Speaker 1: like those old flip phones, and it's like you're a
Speaker 1: little pixelated snake and you eat other pixels to get bigger,
Speaker 1: but then if you hit your own body, it's game over.
Speaker 1: You die. Oh. Absolutely, one of the best games ever invented,
Speaker 1: is so simple and get so compelling. Yeah, no, that
Speaker 1: was that was very exciting, obviously to any zoomers listening
Speaker 1: right now. This may be a foreign concept, but we
Speaker 1: used to have phones that would fold in half, and
Speaker 1: we did not have an endless app store where you
Speaker 1: could get any number of wonderful, colorful graphics, heavy games.
Speaker 1: It was snake and that was about it, I think,
Speaker 1: and you would just control this little snake. But it
Speaker 1: was endless, endless hours of fun. Um. But this is
Speaker 1: what happens to these poor army ants. If an aunt
Speaker 1: accidentally crosses an older pheromone trail, this will cause it
Speaker 1: to loop back around. So it hits this old trail
Speaker 1: and then it goes instead of keeping forward. It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: here's some pheromones. And then it loops loops back around
Speaker 1: on its own old trail, and then it loops to
Speaker 1: the front again. And now that's even stronger, and it's like, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: this is a really strong trail. I should keep following it.
Speaker 1: Other ants do the same thing, and they're all leaving
Speaker 1: their pheromones around as well. I think you can guess
Speaker 1: where this is going. So you end up getting this
Speaker 1: massive spiral of doomed ants, not understanding that instead of
Speaker 1: going forward on their typical path of destruction where they
Speaker 1: eat everything in their way, they are spiraling around and
Speaker 1: around until they are simply going to collapse and die
Speaker 1: unless something interrupts them. If something fortunately happens to fall
Speaker 1: in their path and then they get diverted, that may
Speaker 1: save them. Otherwise they are doomed. Doesn't that mean you
Speaker 1: can protect yourself from these ants just by spraying that
Speaker 1: pheromone in like a circle around your house. Is any
Speaker 1: animal like evolved to mimic this pheromone and like you know,
Speaker 1: badgers or whatever. Yeah, you don't even really have to
Speaker 1: spray a pheromone at them. You would just kind of
Speaker 1: like if you just guided an ant to turn around
Speaker 1: and hit its own pheromone path, that's enough. So I
Speaker 1: don't know if any animal though that's exploited this about them,
Speaker 1: but yeah, you know that that would be an interesting
Speaker 1: evolutionary strategy, especially if you're an animal that like likes
Speaker 1: to eat ants, because if you lead them to loop
Speaker 1: around and around, basically you've got an aunt buffet. Yeah exactly,
Speaker 1: It's like an ant smoothie that makes itself. I love that.
Speaker 1: I'm sure many insectivores would love that idea. I just
Speaker 1: don't know if any is actually taken advantage of that,
Speaker 1: but you should patent that and pitch that to forest
Speaker 1: dwelling in sectivores. Well, our mascot here at, you see,
Speaker 1: irvine is the ant eater. So maybe we should develop
Speaker 1: some like robotic ant eaters that have that sort of
Speaker 1: strategy in them. There you go, what could go wrong
Speaker 1: with robotic ant eaters. So the largest ant mill or
Speaker 1: death spiral ever recorded was described in nineteen one. It
Speaker 1: was one thousand, two hundred feet or three hundred sixty
Speaker 1: five meters in circumference. That is a nightmare with a
Speaker 1: horror movie. Yes, And the problem with the spiral is
Speaker 1: that it runs counter to their evolutionary strategy. When they
Speaker 1: form that river that's like marching forward and then kind
Speaker 1: of diverting to insects that they find to eat. They
Speaker 1: have a pretty good strategy, which is, as you go
Speaker 1: forward in the forest, you're bound to come across prey
Speaker 1: and be able to eat them. But if you're going
Speaker 1: in a spiral, even if you happen to luckily find
Speaker 1: some prey within that spiral, that's going to get eaten
Speaker 1: pretty quickly. Uh, and then you're not going to find
Speaker 1: anything else as you spiral around and around and around,
Speaker 1: and eventually they just run out of fuel, which you know,
Speaker 1: in biological terms that means dying of starvation. So what
Speaker 1: fraction of all the ants on Earth were contained in
Speaker 1: this one spiral? Oh? Probably in this one in I
Speaker 1: don't know, probably point zero zero zero one person of
Speaker 1: ants because there's a lot of ants, I know. So
Speaker 1: if this one spiral is so big, it must have
Speaker 1: had like what millions of ants in it. Now you're
Speaker 1: telling me that it's a tiny fraction of all the ants.
Speaker 1: Basically you're saying that Earth is all ants pretty much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's uh. I believe the matt Like, if you added
Speaker 1: up all the mass of ants, I think it's much
Speaker 1: more than the mass of all humans. Uh So what's
Speaker 1: fascinating about these death spirals is that there is not
Speaker 1: there is no single ant that is deciding to go
Speaker 1: into this spiral, and even collectively, they have not decided
Speaker 1: that this is what they should do. They are following
Speaker 1: a set of straightforward biological rules like computer programming, and
Speaker 1: if they get stuck in the loop, there's no nobody
Speaker 1: to tell them to get unstuck. There's no executive looking
Speaker 1: at the ants from above. There's no like eyes in
Speaker 1: the sky aunt traffic helicopter warning them on their little
Speaker 1: Aunt radios that there's bumper to bumper snarl ant spiral.
Speaker 1: So it is this emergent intelligence that when it goes haywire,
Speaker 1: there's no executive function to unhywire it. I feel the
Speaker 1: same way sometimes, you know, when my brain gets haywire,
Speaker 1: I'm like, what is the magical button to press this disaster? Well,
Speaker 1: that's what's That's something that's so interesting about human consciousness
Speaker 1: is we are if we look at our neurons as
Speaker 1: like these ants, you know, we do have this emergent
Speaker 1: intelligence from neural activity, but we do have the sense
Speaker 1: that we do have like an executive function. We're able
Speaker 1: to like zoom out and maybe see problems as they're happening.
Speaker 1: Or are we like that? That's a big question, is
Speaker 1: like we we have the sense that we have a
Speaker 1: central executive control over our brains. So we have that
Speaker 1: like ant helicopter looking above at the ant spiral, But
Speaker 1: do we really That's that's a huge question in psychology.
Speaker 1: It's we have there's no like part of the brain
Speaker 1: that you can point to, like here, this is where
Speaker 1: the little you sit, you know, you're the president of
Speaker 1: your brain, sits and oversees all of your brains activity.
Speaker 1: That that doesn't exist, even though we have the sense
Speaker 1: that we have this like executive control over our brain.
Speaker 1: It's a it's not necessarily true. Yeah, it's actually a
Speaker 1: really interesting question and active discussion in philosophy as well,
Speaker 1: whether in principle it's possible for everything that we experience
Speaker 1: to just emerge from the complex sort of tooing and
Speaker 1: throwing of little bits following their microscopic rules. Can reductionism
Speaker 1: explain everything? Can even consciousness be explained from little bits
Speaker 1: and pieces, you know, like rocks we don't think are conscious,
Speaker 1: but they're actually made out of the same things that
Speaker 1: you and I are made out of. So somehow consciousness
Speaker 1: would need to like emerge from how those pieces are
Speaker 1: arranged and interacting with each other. But there are other
Speaker 1: philosophers that argue that emergence has its own special rules,
Speaker 1: that there may be properties of things at one scale,
Speaker 1: like the human brain that don't just come from the
Speaker 1: little bits they're made out of. There like extra additional
Speaker 1: rules that come into play when things come together. I
Speaker 1: don't know if I believe that, but it's an active
Speaker 1: area of philosophical debate. But then what isn't right, which
Speaker 1: again kind of is uncannily like what you physicists talk
Speaker 1: about in terms of particle physics, where you have the
Speaker 1: individual rules of say a single particle, but when they're
Speaker 1: in a group, that group of particles will behave in
Speaker 1: a way that is is unique and different than what
Speaker 1: you would think just based on one individual particles behavior
Speaker 1: might be possible. Yeah, and sometimes you can explain it
Speaker 1: in terms of the underlying bits, and sometimes it's a
Speaker 1: question mark. You know, in physics we look at the
Speaker 1: passage of physics. We look at the interactions of tiny
Speaker 1: little particles, and they seem, for example, to be symmetric
Speaker 1: with time, Like the rules don't seem to care whether
Speaker 1: time flows forwards and backwards. But when you drop an
Speaker 1: ice cube into a hot cup of coffee, they definitely
Speaker 1: moves in one direction and not the other. So sometimes
Speaker 1: even in physics without consciousness, we don't understand how rules
Speaker 1: emerged for the big stuff from the little bits. It's
Speaker 1: a really fascinating thing to study, right, And what's interesting
Speaker 1: is like, we don't even need little bits, right, we
Speaker 1: can have something as big as like a reindeer acting
Speaker 1: in a strange way when you put them in a group.
Speaker 1: So like with aunts, I think it's easier to think
Speaker 1: of like, yes, of course, and aunt may behave like
Speaker 1: a particle. It's basically like a teeny tiny robot anyways.
Speaker 1: But a reindeer um, while perhaps not the most intelligent
Speaker 1: animal in the world, but I mean, what is this
Speaker 1: a competition? They are, They're a large animal. They each
Speaker 1: have their own, you know, ways of thinking, and they
Speaker 1: are you know, we can have that sense of this
Speaker 1: animal's consciousness much more clearly than we can with an aunt. However,
Speaker 1: reindeer also will form things like cyclones. Now, fortunately, if
Speaker 1: people are starting to get nervous that Santa's reindeer get
Speaker 1: into a death spiral of their own, don't worry. In
Speaker 1: this case, the reindeer cyclone is a great benef fit
Speaker 1: to the reindeer. It protects them rather than harms them.
Speaker 1: So reindeer are real animals. They are not just Santa's
Speaker 1: means of conveyance. Uh. They're also known as caribou. They
Speaker 1: live in a geographical circle around the North Pole and
Speaker 1: they can form massive herds of up to a million individuals. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, uh as, I seem to increasingly have to say, um,
Speaker 1: you know their populations are declining due to climate change,
Speaker 1: but they still conform these massive, massive herds. So you're
Speaker 1: telling me that caribou and reindeer are the same thing. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: they are so. So every time I've ordered a caribou steak,
Speaker 1: they might be giving me a piece of reindeer. Yep,
Speaker 1: you might be eating rootolf. I do have to ask
Speaker 1: how often you're able to get caribou steak. I don't
Speaker 1: eat a lot of exotic meats, but my son is
Speaker 1: keeping track of the number of different animals he's ever
Speaker 1: eaten in his lifetime. So whenever there's an opportunity, you
Speaker 1: see something on the menu, like oh, Ostrich Burger, let's
Speaker 1: go for it. He's a bit like Darwin in that respect.
Speaker 1: Darwin loved to eat animals, like animals he would newly discover,
Speaker 1: and one of his main questions was what does it
Speaker 1: taste like? Does echo better with cheese on top or
Speaker 1: without cheese on top? A new paper by Charles Darwin
Speaker 1: his Hidden Manuscripts. But reindeer are used to dealing with threats.
Speaker 1: Even aside from your voracious son, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of predators that have a taste for reindeer meat. Brown bears,
Speaker 1: polar bears, wolves, human hunters. Even golden eagles will sometimes
Speaker 1: prey on reindeer calves. So you can imagine that reindeer
Speaker 1: have a reason to be a bit paranoid. But that
Speaker 1: makes me wonder if army ants have ever taken down
Speaker 1: a reindeer calf, Like, what's the biggest thing an army
Speaker 1: ant could eat? Could cyclone of army ants takedown and
Speaker 1: baby reindeer? I mean, they wouldn't inhabit the same habitats
Speaker 1: at all. I don't think they could take down a
Speaker 1: baby reindeer unless that baby reindeer again was like already
Speaker 1: sick or couldn't move. Just a horrifying idea all around.
Speaker 1: Thank you for bringing that up. I'm not saying we
Speaker 1: should do the experiment. I'm just saying it's an open question. Uh.
Speaker 1: You you just disappointed. Some biologists were like, oh, I
Speaker 1: shouldn't do that experiment, darn it. Uh. But reindeer are
Speaker 1: not so helpless. They have a trick up their furry
Speaker 1: little sleeves. When a danger threatens the herd, they will
Speaker 1: circle the wagons. They form a defensive cyclone. It's like
Speaker 1: a whirlpool of reindeer. Uh, and it is it is
Speaker 1: stunning to see. You should definitely look up video of
Speaker 1: this and I'll will include that in the show notes.
Speaker 1: But it is, it's it's mesmerizing. And is this like
Speaker 1: a bug in the programming of reindeer the way it
Speaker 1: is for army ants or is this actually like defensive?
Speaker 1: Does this help them in some way? This is helpful
Speaker 1: to them? It is not a bug, it's a feature.
Speaker 1: So um by making this whirlpool, they make it extremely
Speaker 1: difficult for a predator to focus on a single individual
Speaker 1: and take them down. Even an intelligent predator like a human,
Speaker 1: will find it difficult to do something like aim an
Speaker 1: arrow as they swirl around and around in this dizzy mob.
Speaker 1: It's because like you can't just necessarily, as a predator,
Speaker 1: run randomly and start chomping like usually the goal is
Speaker 1: you eye a certain target and try to take that down.
Speaker 1: But if you can't even keep track of what your
Speaker 1: target is, it's very difficult to take anything down. So
Speaker 1: this behavior has actually been observed by researchers in captive
Speaker 1: reindeer herds. When reindeer are corralled, they start to form
Speaker 1: the cyclone. And this is what's so strange is that
Speaker 1: this cyclone seems to typically run counterclockwise. This preference for
Speaker 1: left word movement is also paralleled by a preference reindeer
Speaker 1: have for using their left hoofs to dig up grass.
Speaker 1: So they'll use these very these cup shaped hoofs to
Speaker 1: dig up snow to get at like the vegetation underneath
Speaker 1: the snow. And they tend to seem seem to favor
Speaker 1: the left hoof. And they also run in a left
Speaker 1: words direction when they form these cyclones like this counterclockwise direction.
Speaker 1: And it's completely unknown why this happens or if there's
Speaker 1: even a significance to this happening. Wow, and do they
Speaker 1: also vote Democrat? I don't know. I'll do a straw
Speaker 1: pole of the reindeer, but I'm worried they just eat
Speaker 1: the straw um. But I have a question, is this
Speaker 1: surrounding the Is this surrounding the danger? If something wants
Speaker 1: to eat the reindeer, they'll surround it or the or
Speaker 1: the danger is like on the outside of the cyclone
Speaker 1: and it can't even like and it can't even like
Speaker 1: visualize which one to eat. It's the latter. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: they're not surrounding the predator. It's usually the predators on
Speaker 1: the outskirts, and it's trying to pinpoint a reindeer to
Speaker 1: pick out to try to take down, but it can't
Speaker 1: because it's just the swirling vortex of reindeer. Uh in
Speaker 1: the center. I have read that sometimes in the center
Speaker 1: it's like the younger reindeer the calves, but I have
Speaker 1: been unable to find like research that has verified that.
Speaker 1: It's just like sort of observation of it seems like
Speaker 1: maybe the younger reindeer tender stick in the middle. Um.
Speaker 1: And what's so interesting about this is that, I mean,
Speaker 1: first of all, I mentioned that that I haven't been
Speaker 1: able to find research on whether it's true that like
Speaker 1: reindeer calves are in the center. It's because research on
Speaker 1: these reindeer cyclones is kind of surprisingly incomplete. Um. And
Speaker 1: so it's it's hard to really know exactly what's going on,
Speaker 1: which is a big hint for you know, Santa out
Speaker 1: there to start funding some research on reindeers. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: what is so strange about this is what exactly is
Speaker 1: going on with these reindeer. They don't use pheromones in
Speaker 1: the same way that army ants use um. But I
Speaker 1: suspect that it's not so much that the reindeer have
Speaker 1: decided to form this cyclone. There's not like a all
Speaker 1: hooves meeting that they, you know, decided like, well, if
Speaker 1: we come across the predator, let's form the cyclone, so
Speaker 1: it confuses them. Instead, what's far more likely is that
Speaker 1: they have a set of instinctive rules. And when you
Speaker 1: have each individual reindeer with that set of instinctive rules
Speaker 1: and you combine them in this herd, you get a
Speaker 1: similar group behavior as you see with the ants. So
Speaker 1: even though reindeer are more complex more intelligent than an
Speaker 1: army ant, once you get them in this group setting,
Speaker 1: they're probably operating on a similar set of rules that
Speaker 1: these army ants. Instead of using pheromones, they're probably using
Speaker 1: their relative closeness to other reindeer, and they're probably using
Speaker 1: directional cues from these other reindeer. And by using the
Speaker 1: set of rules, they then collectively form the cyclone without
Speaker 1: any individual knowing exactly what they are achieving. Here, it
Speaker 1: feels to me, like when you're that kid who wants
Speaker 1: to get on the Merry go Round, Like when you're
Speaker 1: when you're that kid who wants to get on the carousel,
Speaker 1: but it's already started and it's moving too fast, and
Speaker 1: so you can't even like grab onto one of the
Speaker 1: horses or the reindeer to jump on it. But that
Speaker 1: makes me wonder, like in my mind, all carousel's spin counterclockwise.
Speaker 1: Is that true? Is that the arrived from the reindeer vortex?
Speaker 1: That's an interesting interesting thought. I think like the carousels
Speaker 1: tended to be they weren't they like originally sort of
Speaker 1: a a toy that was supposed to be mimicking sort
Speaker 1: of uh, combat on horseback, like where you you know,
Speaker 1: you'd have your lance, and like I think originally like
Speaker 1: there was like a golden ring that you're supposed to
Speaker 1: try to like hit with a stick or something while
Speaker 1: you're on the carousel. That's supposed to be mimicking sort
Speaker 1: of lancing. So that that was a really interesting question.
Speaker 1: But now I want to see a reindeer carousel because
Speaker 1: that would be much more biologically accurate. We've talked about
Speaker 1: a couple of cases of group dynamics and how instinct
Speaker 1: can lead to complex mob behavior that can either be
Speaker 1: deadly in the case of those poor army ants, or
Speaker 1: life saving in the case of reindeer cyclones that protects
Speaker 1: them from predators. But now I want to talk more
Speaker 1: about the actual physics behind a group behavior. So, Daniel,
Speaker 1: you are a particle physicist. Do you think that an
Speaker 1: animal can behave like a particle? Well, particles follow physical laws,
Speaker 1: and so do animals. You know what can particles do?
Speaker 1: They can like fly through space. They can also change directions,
Speaker 1: but to do that they have to like emit something.
Speaker 1: They have to like cast ne to like shoot off
Speaker 1: a photon for example. Like if you're an astronaut and
Speaker 1: you're floating through space and you want to turn, you
Speaker 1: gotta fire a little rocket or like throw a rock
Speaker 1: off in one direction to change direction. So there's not
Speaker 1: that much that particles can do other than fly through space,
Speaker 1: change direction, and bounce against each other. But you know,
Speaker 1: put them together in a huge collection and then they
Speaker 1: can do all sorts of other weird stuff like become
Speaker 1: chocolate cake. Oh I like, I like the idea of
Speaker 1: particles becoming chocolate cake, But that does make the segue
Speaker 1: weirder because we are talking about starlings, who, as far
Speaker 1: as I know, you know, you can bake them into
Speaker 1: a pie, but that seems kind of disgusting. Starlings are
Speaker 1: these beautiful, little black but also iridescent birds, and they
Speaker 1: have these white speckles, and that's why they're called starlings.
Speaker 1: They look like a star speckled sky. To me, they
Speaker 1: look like a night sky. That and that rainbow sheen
Speaker 1: on their wings actually kind of looks like one of
Speaker 1: those NASA colored images of a galaxy. They're they're stunningly
Speaker 1: beautiful in my opinion. Yeah, and so you're saying that
Speaker 1: you've never seen enough starlings come together to make a
Speaker 1: chocolate cake, not yet, one can hope through sheer probability. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, the number of particles in a chocolate cake
Speaker 1: is approximately ten to the twenty six, So I think
Speaker 1: probably you just need to wait for enough starlings together
Speaker 1: and the huge cosmic chocolate cake might just emerge. But
Speaker 1: again another open question in science. I think the math
Speaker 1: checks out on that. So, uh, starlings do form giant flocks,
Speaker 1: not quite tin to the what tinto the twenty six
Speaker 1: is what you said, not quite that large, um, but
Speaker 1: millions of individuals. So when they are in these giant flocks,
Speaker 1: if you live somewhere where these starlings live, or if
Speaker 1: you've just seen videos, they will generate these murmurations. What
Speaker 1: a murmuration is is when you see like a flock,
Speaker 1: and then you see a pattern kind of like flow
Speaker 1: across these birds, like a dark band kind of flow
Speaker 1: across these birds. Um, it's these undulating patterns and designs
Speaker 1: where they kind of look like there's some singular shape
Speaker 1: shifting creature in the sky or smoke or or something.
Speaker 1: But really it's just a bunch of birds responding to
Speaker 1: each other's movements. It's amazing and I always wonder what's
Speaker 1: it like to be one of those starlings. Is it
Speaker 1: wonderful you're like doing synchronized swimming with a million of
Speaker 1: your friends, or is it like a nightmare, like you're
Speaker 1: stuck in traffic like American in the traffic circle in Europe?
Speaker 1: You know, is it fun or is it terrible? Well,
Speaker 1: that's a really interesting question. I think it very much
Speaker 1: depends on the circumstances. Sometimes these murmurations are in response
Speaker 1: to predators, So in that case, yeah, I'd imagine they're
Speaker 1: a little bit concerned. But sometimes these birds will form
Speaker 1: these flocks and start to do these murmurations, and it's
Speaker 1: not even exactly clear what they are responding to what
Speaker 1: they're doing, or if it's simply fun for them. So,
Speaker 1: just like we may sometimes run and jump when we
Speaker 1: are scared when there's something coming at us, sometimes we
Speaker 1: run and jump because it's fun. So I think it's
Speaker 1: very situationally dependent how these birds feel. But I would
Speaker 1: say in gen role they like the traffic, like when
Speaker 1: they are inside that flock. If I was to kind
Speaker 1: of get into the head of a starling, I think
Speaker 1: I'd feel much more secure inside the flock than on
Speaker 1: my own. I don't think i'd feel claustrophobic or social anxiety.
Speaker 1: I think I would know if I'm surrounded by birds,
Speaker 1: I'm much like less likely to become a snack for
Speaker 1: some predatory bird. I mean, you also prefer like line dancing,
Speaker 1: because you're surrounded by hundreds of people doing exactly the
Speaker 1: same moves, nobody can make fun of you. Well, It's
Speaker 1: why I enjoy improv better than stand up because with improv,
Speaker 1: you've got a lot of people that cover your mistakes
Speaker 1: with stand up. You've got nobody. And so if you
Speaker 1: start crying, everyone notices. If we bomb, at least we
Speaker 1: bombed together exactly exactly. So I'm very I very much
Speaker 1: have a starling personality. The evolutionary advantage of these big flocks,
Speaker 1: these murmurations very much is like the reindeer we talked about,
Speaker 1: where they can dodge away from predators, and by being
Speaker 1: in this huge flock, not only is it more confusing
Speaker 1: to predators, but it's just law of large numbers. You're
Speaker 1: less likely to be the one picked out of the group. Um.
Speaker 1: But the huge difference between these birds and the reindeer
Speaker 1: in terms of physics is the birds are in completely
Speaker 1: unrestricted three dimensional space. Reindeer run along the ground. I mean,
Speaker 1: I know reindeer are three dimensional and their movements are
Speaker 1: strictly speaking three dimensional, but they are more or less
Speaker 1: on a plane and like spiraling around this plane, whereas
Speaker 1: the birds can move in any direction that they want.
Speaker 1: It's much like in space when you have spaceships, and
Speaker 1: in sci fi it's always confusing why you'd have rear
Speaker 1: thrusters and not every which way thrusters, because you are
Speaker 1: an entirely three dimensional space. Are you telling us that
Speaker 1: reindeer don't fly? I mean, you're just like really cracking
Speaker 1: your younger listeners. I hope they're I'm only talking, of
Speaker 1: course about the non magical reindeer. Of course, the magical
Speaker 1: reindeer fly, but Santa has to select those reindeer and
Speaker 1: feed them royal reindeer jelly that causes them to sprout wings.
Speaker 1: And I think I'm actually talking about bees now or
Speaker 1: aunt anyways, um birds fly in this three dimensional space
Speaker 1: up down side to side three hundred sixty degrees. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so this causes really interesting waves and undulations that
Speaker 1: you won't necessarily see in other crowd behavior. So statistical
Speaker 1: physicist Dr Andrea Cavna and theoretical physicist Dr Irene Jardina
Speaker 1: studied the mini starling flocks found here in Italy, and
Speaker 1: they found that these birds were acting similar to particles
Speaker 1: or molecules whose group movements can be described as scale
Speaker 1: free correlation. So I'm not a physicist, so Daniels, stop
Speaker 1: me if I say something wrong here, but from my research,
Speaker 1: it seems like scale free correlation is when individual particles
Speaker 1: or individual birds move not only based on their immediate neighbors,
Speaker 1: but on the entire flock or entire group of particles.
Speaker 1: Is that more or less correct? Yeah. Effectively, it's when
Speaker 1: your choices, your directions, are not just influenced by what's
Speaker 1: immediately around you, but sort of like longer scale forces
Speaker 1: or influences. That's exactly what is happening with these birds.
Speaker 1: The movements of one individual bird will affect the movements
Speaker 1: of a bird way over on the entire other side
Speaker 1: of the flock. So each starling will adjust its direction
Speaker 1: and velocity based on its immediate neighbors. But that also
Speaker 1: means that the starling's next to that starling change their
Speaker 1: velocity and trajectory and so on and so forth. Uh.
Speaker 1: And what this means is that because these birds are
Speaker 1: so sensitive to changing their flight behavior based on their
Speaker 1: neighbors and their neighbors based on their other neighbors, they
Speaker 1: are the actions of one starling in the flock has
Speaker 1: an impact a measurable impact on every other starling in
Speaker 1: the flock, and vice versa, and it creates this incredible complexity.
Speaker 1: It's amazing to me that it's not just chaotic. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you have so many objects that are very sensitively
Speaker 1: responding to other objects. Why isn't it just like a
Speaker 1: crazy mess? You know, if you throw like a million
Speaker 1: ping pong balls down the steps, you don't get any
Speaker 1: sort of like emergent pattern, You just get insanity. And
Speaker 1: so it's amazing to me that the starlings don't just
Speaker 1: create a big mess. There must be some instinct to
Speaker 1: also follow their neighbors, not just respond to them. That's right,
Speaker 1: that's right, And that's actually very good question because this
Speaker 1: is exactly what these physicists, these biological physicists are look into,
Speaker 1: and they found that these starlings are operating on a
Speaker 1: very precise set of rules um because they do not
Speaker 1: want to crash into their neighbors, but they don't want
Speaker 1: to leave the flock because if they're the slow one,
Speaker 1: the one that like makes a wrong direction and accidentally
Speaker 1: leaves the safety of a flock, they are going to
Speaker 1: instantly be a target of like a hawk. So it
Speaker 1: is so important for each individual's survival to be able
Speaker 1: to set follow a set of rules, which is, I
Speaker 1: want to maintain proximity to my neighbors, close proximity to
Speaker 1: my neighbors without crashing into them. But I also want
Speaker 1: to change my direction sensitively to my neighbor. If my
Speaker 1: neighbor turns left, I also want to turn left. Um
Speaker 1: but I And so by the fact that they have
Speaker 1: these complex rules means that the entire flock actually starts
Speaker 1: to behave more like a fluid or a gas. And
Speaker 1: when you look at um murmurating flock of starlings, it
Speaker 1: really doesn't look like it. It looks like something kind
Speaker 1: of alien or or you know, like when you look
Speaker 1: at say, you know, when you blow a candle out
Speaker 1: and you see like the smoke kind of swirling around,
Speaker 1: it has these to our eyes unpredictable movements. But uh,
Speaker 1: it really is predictable movements if you have sort of
Speaker 1: a mathematical model of how this smoke behaves. But it's
Speaker 1: very complicated, so we can't just looking at this smoke
Speaker 1: kind of predict which way it's going to go, what
Speaker 1: it's going to do. And the really weird thing is
Speaker 1: that these starlings are acting like the kinds of particles
Speaker 1: that you studied, Daniel, because they don't just adjust their
Speaker 1: velocity and direction based on their neighbors, but the sharpness
Speaker 1: of turns. So some physicists some of these physicist who
Speaker 1: are studying these birds actually call it the spin of
Speaker 1: the starling, similar to the spin of an elementary particle. Wow,
Speaker 1: and that makes me wonder if there are quantum starlings
Speaker 1: out there spin up or spin down, or if you
Speaker 1: can have entanglement of starlings. I guess that's where the
Speaker 1: starlings are trying to avoid actually tangled up in each other. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't exactly want to become entangled. It does mean
Speaker 1: that they have the conservation of spin. So the cumulative
Speaker 1: spin of the flock is conserved when the starlings match
Speaker 1: their their neighbors. So like once starling doesn't just like
Speaker 1: if one starling turns left, the other starling isn't just
Speaker 1: thinking okay, I turn left now. It is also matching
Speaker 1: that sharpness of the turn. And like I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: the actions of one starling affects the actions of the
Speaker 1: entire flock and vice versa. And so this means that
Speaker 1: the entire flock of starlings can change its spin or
Speaker 1: the sharpness of its turns almost on a dime. And
Speaker 1: this allows them to change directions in response to danger
Speaker 1: as if they are a single organism moving rather than
Speaker 1: a group of birds. That's incredible. Well, it's almost like
Speaker 1: together the starlings are a super brain. Yeah. And what's
Speaker 1: weird is that the mathematical models used to describe the
Speaker 1: physics of starlings are identical to that of super fluid helium.
Speaker 1: So when helium is cooled to almost absolute zero, Uh,
Speaker 1: it becomes like a liquid, right Daniel, mm hmm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the viscosity drops really really low, so you can like
Speaker 1: slide past itself with almost no friction and yeah, and
Speaker 1: that almost completely absent viscosity is the same thing that
Speaker 1: happens with these starlings because remember they don't want to
Speaker 1: buy into each other, right, because that that would also
Speaker 1: mean death. Like if you stray too far from the flock,
Speaker 1: that means death. You collide with the neighbor and you
Speaker 1: both fall, that means death. So it is in in
Speaker 1: evolutionary terms, they have been turned into such precise flying
Speaker 1: machines where they are very careful not to collide, and
Speaker 1: by not colliding, they don't have friction. There's not that viscosity,
Speaker 1: and so they act like super fluid helium almost exactly.
Speaker 1: And I think the mathematical models that they use for
Speaker 1: these birds are the same ones, or at least incredibly
Speaker 1: similar to the ones that they use for super fluid helium.
Speaker 1: It's incredible to me that we find these little mathematical
Speaker 1: stories that can describe the universe, and they don't just
Speaker 1: describe one part of the universe. You can use the
Speaker 1: same kind of mathematical stories to describe super fluid helium
Speaker 1: and also flocks of starlings. It's incredible and it makes
Speaker 1: me wonder if the mathematicians who say that the universe
Speaker 1: self is mathematical are really onto something. I mean, it
Speaker 1: is there's something. I guess it depends on your relationship
Speaker 1: with math. It's either spooky or it's inspiring that math
Speaker 1: does seem to be behind so many things, Like you know,
Speaker 1: you look at a flock of birds and it's like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, this is described by the same equation that
Speaker 1: you use to describe something that is about as different
Speaker 1: from a bird as you can think in terms of
Speaker 1: just like our superficial understanding of things like super fluid helium.
Speaker 1: That's that's not birds, but it is acting. But you know,
Speaker 1: when you look at if you were like an alien
Speaker 1: who could only see in terms of these mathematical models,
Speaker 1: you would think like, well, these two things must be
Speaker 1: very closely related, this flock of birds in this super
Speaker 1: fluid helium, because the math that describes them both is
Speaker 1: is identical. Yeah, and that would make you wonder, as
Speaker 1: an alien scientist, what happens if super cool down a
Speaker 1: flock of starlings? Does it become even more viscous or
Speaker 1: even less viscous? I'm just saying the question is open
Speaker 1: in science. If you had become an evolutionary biologist instead
Speaker 1: of a particle physicist, you would run a foul of
Speaker 1: so many of the ethics boards involved in designing biology experiments. Okay,
Speaker 1: I hope that wasn't an unintentional punt running a foul
Speaker 1: of these ethics sports. That's gonna that's gonna get you
Speaker 1: even more trouble with the ethics sports. So we've talked
Speaker 1: about animals and their group physics Starling's reindeer ants and
Speaker 1: you think that you may think that group physics are
Speaker 1: only for these simple animals and not for intelligent animals
Speaker 1: like us humans. But uh, you'd be wrong. So even
Speaker 1: highly intelligent animals such as people, are subject to mob physics.
Speaker 1: Human crowds don't necessarily inherit the intelligence and decision making
Speaker 1: of each individual human. Human brains in groups can be
Speaker 1: quite powerful, but that's only when the brains are capable
Speaker 1: of communicating. So, like you know, we have as societies
Speaker 1: developed amazing technologies, amazing medical breakthroughs and discoveries. Um, but
Speaker 1: that's because that is our brains kind of pulling together.
Speaker 1: But when you're in a physical crowd, our ability to communicate,
Speaker 1: one of our biggest strengths as humans, can be hindered.
Speaker 1: So like beach or facial expression can get drowned out
Speaker 1: by a big enough crowd and more chaotic crowd, and
Speaker 1: the movements of people actually start to mimic not a
Speaker 1: group of intelligent creatures, but a group of particles. That's incredible,
Speaker 1: But I guess it doesn't surprise me, because like economics
Speaker 1: is a thing, right, we can describe the behavior of
Speaker 1: huge groups of people based on the individual little choices
Speaker 1: they're making buying and selling and not buying nikes because
Speaker 1: they're more than a hundred bucks and buying them when
Speaker 1: they dropped to ninety bucks. So I guess that makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense that there are emergent phenomena on
Speaker 1: the scale of societies as well. Yeah, not like in economics,
Speaker 1: like when you have things like inflation that increases too quickly,
Speaker 1: sometimes that is due to these like small individual decisions
Speaker 1: that are being you know, it's maybe it is what
Speaker 1: did I call it a scale free scale free correlations,
Speaker 1: scale free correlations, because like your individual decision making will
Speaker 1: impact the entire economy, and the entire like economy, impacts
Speaker 1: every individual's decision making. So is this feedback loop. And
Speaker 1: it's the same thing for for group physics crowd physics,
Speaker 1: and it can get actually quite dangerous as the movements
Speaker 1: of people start to resemble a fluid rather than a
Speaker 1: group of individual people who have brains and can think.
Speaker 1: So researchers are actually looking into how to model human
Speaker 1: crowds through hydro dynamics, using observational data from real life
Speaker 1: crowd situations such as marathon runners, because the hope is
Speaker 1: that by modeling human crowd behavior we can actually save
Speaker 1: lives in crowd situations such as in stadiums or other
Speaker 1: enclosed spaces, where the crowding of people can actually lead
Speaker 1: to injury or even in some cases death. Um So,
Speaker 1: crowd crushes are a rare but very tragic event in
Speaker 1: which people get crushed in crowds, not due to malicious
Speaker 1: actions by other people, but simple physics. So like if
Speaker 1: you have a big crowd in a stadium and then
Speaker 1: a choke point, things can get very dangerous very fast
Speaker 1: because the people at the back of the crowd can't
Speaker 1: see or hear what's happening in the front, so they
Speaker 1: may continue to move forward while the group of people
Speaker 1: in the front start to get condensed together unable to move. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is again it's like sometimes in these like
Speaker 1: crowd crush things, people think it's due to an unruly
Speaker 1: riot of people or people being you know, behaving in
Speaker 1: some kind of bizarre way, and that's not at all
Speaker 1: the case. It's just because of the way that a
Speaker 1: huge group will basically run into the constraints of physics,
Speaker 1: and then the inability of the people in the front
Speaker 1: of the crowd to be able to communicate to the
Speaker 1: people in the back of the crowd. So basically you're
Speaker 1: saying physics kills respect our local physicists as if they
Speaker 1: were a swarm of army and your words, not mine. Uh,
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean it is of course, you know,
Speaker 1: like physics is. It is the guiding principle of our
Speaker 1: entire lives and our our physical bodies. And so when
Speaker 1: you're in a crowd, you have to respect the physics
Speaker 1: of a crowd just as much as you have to
Speaker 1: respect the physics of gravity if you're jumping out of
Speaker 1: a plane. So people who have survived crowd crushes or
Speaker 1: crowd collapse describe it as being carried away by a
Speaker 1: fluid force, like as if they're being carried away by
Speaker 1: a river. Sometimes their feet aren't even touching the ground.
Speaker 1: They're just unable to move of their own volition and
Speaker 1: just being carried away like they're being swept away by
Speaker 1: a river. Uh. And when people like if people see
Speaker 1: people ahead of them getting hurt, they of course may
Speaker 1: want to stop, and mentally they're thinking, oh, no, I
Speaker 1: don't want to run into this person. I don't want
Speaker 1: this person to get hurt. But at that point they're
Speaker 1: actually kind of stuck as being a part article and
Speaker 1: this like fluid force of the crowd, and that, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's one of the one of the more scary things
Speaker 1: that I can imagine. Yes, the famous person particle duality
Speaker 1: we know of humankind. Sometimes you're a person and sometimes
Speaker 1: you just feel like a particle. Yeah, exactly. And this
Speaker 1: has been a problem for humanity for as long as
Speaker 1: there's been crowds, and has actually been recorded since the
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds. Uh. Sometimes it's blamed on the crowd, like
Speaker 1: during the Hillsboro disaster in nine where people in a
Speaker 1: football stadium were injured and killed during a crowd crush. Um.
Speaker 1: But this was not at all the people's fault. It
Speaker 1: was simply due to uh, the design of the stadium
Speaker 1: and the crowd control there was, you know, it was.
Speaker 1: It is one of these situations where it's like you
Speaker 1: if you have a jug of water and you pour
Speaker 1: it into a cup of water and it kind of
Speaker 1: sloshes and splashes around. That is not the fault of
Speaker 1: the part coals inside the water. It's not the fault
Speaker 1: of the um the water molecules inside for splashing around.
Speaker 1: They are simply caught up in the group dynamics of
Speaker 1: being part of this group of water molecules that will
Speaker 1: behave as a fluid. It sounds like you're setting up
Speaker 1: physics to take the blame here. The fall guy. Uh,
Speaker 1: Physics is always the fall guy. Really when you think
Speaker 1: about it, the whole reason we fall anyways, So I
Speaker 1: will take credit for that one. So I bring this
Speaker 1: up not to not to demonize physics or physicists, but
Speaker 1: to demonstrate some of the importance of understanding biological physics.
Speaker 1: If you can model the fluid dynamics of a crowd,
Speaker 1: you could use that data to plan the construction of
Speaker 1: things like buildings and stadiums, or the implementation of crowd
Speaker 1: control to make things safer for people. So it's these
Speaker 1: kinds of things that we research. It's like, as amazing
Speaker 1: and interesting as they are, I think on their own,
Speaker 1: Like I want to know that birds can behave like
Speaker 1: helium because that's really cool, but it can also be
Speaker 1: really important for our society. Yeah, it's a fascinating topic
Speaker 1: with all sorts of wrinkles in physics, in biology, and
Speaker 1: in psychology. Yeah. Absolutely. But before we go, I do
Speaker 1: want to play a little game called Gifts Who Squawk
Speaker 1: and the Mystery Animal Sound Game. So every week I
Speaker 1: play a mystery animal sound and do the listener. I
Speaker 1: try to gifts who is making up sound? It can
Speaker 1: be any animal in the world. Does that include physicists?
Speaker 1: Could be a physicist, could be a physicist that's right,
Speaker 1: you bunch of animals. Um So last week's uh mry
Speaker 1: animals sound hint was we've talked about the elephant in
Speaker 1: the room, but what about the rhinoceros in the room,
Speaker 1: who's not really a rhino? So ignore the bird sounds.
Speaker 1: But did you hear that like hissing sound? Yeah, that
Speaker 1: sounds like what I hear in my freshman physics classes
Speaker 1: when I assign homework. So you're saying that your physics
Speaker 1: students are a group of rhinoceros beetles, because this is
Speaker 1: a rhinoceros beetle. Congratulations to the three fastest guessers, Joey P.
Speaker 1: Michael D. Shana S who gets correctly. Also honorable mentioned
Speaker 1: to Zoe H and Grant W. Who gets the specific
Speaker 1: species of rhino beetle, the common rhino beetle from Australia.
Speaker 1: And thanks to everyone else who wrote in and gets correctly.
Speaker 1: Excellent job you guys. I am so so impressed. I
Speaker 1: don't think I could be as good as you guys
Speaker 1: at this game. I make the game, but I don't
Speaker 1: guess it, so uh, great job everyone. So this is
Speaker 1: the rhinoceros beetles, specifically the zylo troop. As you list
Speaker 1: these Australicus found in Australia, when they are bothered, they
Speaker 1: will hits that you like a cat. But that hissing
Speaker 1: is not coming out of vocal cords, which the rhino
Speaker 1: slurspeetle lacks. Instead, it's stridulation, the vibration of its wing
Speaker 1: covers against its abdomen. Now onto this week's mystery animal sound.
Speaker 1: Don't blame the dog for this one, but it is
Speaker 1: the sound of a happy carnivore. So I promise that
Speaker 1: is not a rude sound. But if you think you
Speaker 1: know who is squawking, you can write to me a
Speaker 1: Creature Feature pot at gmail dot com. I'm also online
Speaker 1: at Creature feet cot on Twitter. That's t f ET.
Speaker 1: That is something very different. Thank you so much to
Speaker 1: Daniel Whiteson for joining me today. If you want to
Speaker 1: hear more from Daniel and hear him talk more about
Speaker 1: the Mr Reads of the Universe and particle physics, check
Speaker 1: out his podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe and
Speaker 1: sometimes I'm a guest host on that podcast, so yes,
Speaker 1: check that out. Thanks very much for having me on, Katie.
Speaker 1: Thank you guys so much for listening. If you're enjoying
Speaker 1: the show and you want to leave or rating or review,
Speaker 1: I would appreciate that so so so much. I read
Speaker 1: every review and it means the world to me. It
Speaker 1: also really helps me out. Like when you leave a
Speaker 1: rating or review, it helps the podcast out. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it is a wonderful freeway to express your joy for
Speaker 1: the podcast and to help support the podcast. And thanks
Speaker 1: so much to the Space Classics for their super awesome song.
Speaker 1: Exoluminous Creature Feature is a production of I heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit
Speaker 1: the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or Hey guess
Speaker 1: what wherever you get your favorite shows. I do not
Speaker 1: judge you, and I will not tattle on you. See
Speaker 1: you next Wednesday. Ay,