Heavy Metal and Emergent Behavior

You may think that moshing and disordered 2D gases don't have much in common but Jesse Silverberg of Cornell University contends otherwise. He says that mosh pits act just like disordered gases and people in circle pits act in an ordered vortex-like state. From the article: "Silverberg and co gathered their data by examining videos of mosh pits on You Tube... These crowds contain anything from 100 to 100,000 people. After correcting for camera shake and distortions in perspective, they used particle image velicometry techniques to measure the collective motion of moshers. What they discovered was that the speed distribution of moshers closely matches that of molecules in a 2D gas at equilibrium."

Comments

Who would've thought

[jampola]

A large group of people in a circle pit resembles a bunch of molecules circling? I'll be damned.

Re:Who would've thought

[MrKaos]

A large group of people in a circle pit resembles a bunch of molecules circling? I'll be damned.

Who'd have thought being a molecule in a disordered gas reaching equilibrium could be so much fun. It's a pity that many venues want to ban emergent behaviour.

Re:Who would've thought

[StripedCow]

So physics is actually close to psychology, and not really a hard science.

Re:Who would've thought

[Shinobi]

I was actually thinking "So, physicists only NOW catch up with psychology?".

Psychology has used concepts from gas and particle physics for at least 40 years, and in many way follow the same rules: You can generalize a group, but an individual can only be statistically compared with the group traits and not specifically predicted.

IG Nobel!

[Anonymous Coward]

A sure candidate.

Weird

[Neil Boekend]

My experience with smaller mosh pits (guess: up to 50 headbangers) indicates a different pattern, more like a sloshing wave. Most people move in one direction until they get near the edge and then go back.
Is this a size thing? The mosh pits analyzed in this story are bigger. Changes that the behavior?

Physicists

[kid-noodle]

Consider a spherical heavy metal fan..

Re:Physicists

[inamorty]

Consider a spherical heavy metal fan..

Only if he's in a vacuum.

Re:Physicists

[MadKeithV]

Consider a spherical heavy metal fan..

Only if he's in a vacuum.

Metalheads operate in a social vacuum.

Re:Physicists

[lesincompetent]

Phisicists operate in a social vacuum, not metalheads. You are clearly not one of them.

Re:Physicists

[MadKeithV]

Yes.

General phenomena, NKS

[Janek Kozicki]

You might be interested in new kind of science, where Stephen Wolfram argues that fluid (and gas) movement is a general pehonomena, which can be replicated using only very basic rules. And therefore must occur in very broad range of materials, regardless of their underlying precise rules. And he is right. I am no surprised that this also applies to heavy metal crowds.

Airheads! I knew it all along!

[fantomas]

"the speed distribution of moshers closely matches that of molecules in a 2D gas at equilibrium"

I knew all along that metal fans were all airheads, now proven by science!

Peer review......

[voodoo cheesecake]

How music fans act as molecules.

Headbangers + applied energy (awesome riffs & volume) fill a volume as individual particles, do not form products, expand the volume of their "container" as pressure increases and dissipate when applied energy source is removed.

Country line dancers (extremely soluble in ethanol) + applied energy (twangy vocals and guitars + ethanol) enter solution as a binary compound, form complex molecules and then dissipate as binary compounds (not necessarily with the original conjugate species). However, once the molarity of ethanol diminishes, these binary compounds dissolve and seek higher concentrations of ethanol often showing an affinity for elements with a higher electronegativity (redneck factor). It must be noted that country line dancers become highly volatile for no known reason(s) regardless of the concentration of the ethanol solution.

If you argue with me, how about we turn this into a peer reviewed article right here on slashdot!

Re:Peer review......

[voodoo cheesecake]

Ravers require a catalyst to lower the activation energy. Many effective catalysts are known to exist, but pure ones are desired to eliminate undesired results. So, ravers + activation energy (complex audio range frequencies in the presence of various light sources), begin to exhibit unexplainable quantum effects. These quantum effects vary significantly within the sample. Although some elements may seem to have the required energy and orientation to effectively bond, particle proximity seems sufficient enough to observe results such as random and vivid kaleidoscoping fractal patterns. This results in other molecules, not necessarily in direct contact, adopting similar properties which either homogenize or further break apart to reveal quarks that allow even more complex reactions to occur. Periodically, the wrong combination of reaction mechanisms can result in short-term irreversible immediate and direct return to the pre-catalyzing state.

Peer reviews of such reactions are difficult because no experiment has been shown to be repeatable - the results, although similar, are never the same.

However, it must be noted that certain mixtures of catalysts have demonstrated long term and sometimes irreversible excitation - even when removed from the reaction vessel and isolated in a clinical setting.

Including the reactions mentioned in my earlier post, raver reactions appear to have the least destructive effect on the environment. In correlation to theories of the origins of the universe the big bang theory has greater merit. However, unraveling raver reactions seems to support the possibility of the steady state theory being a premonition of what may soon develop. Politicians and judges have fought hard to control access to the required catalysts to prove such a possibility, and many research proposals are continually denied for illusory reasons. Perhaps they are right in their motives because if you are trying to qualify and quantify raver reactions, you are totally missing the point! Raver reactions exist of their own accord toward the extent of a continual BIG BANG; where no politicians or judges could exist.

Translation at work

[Tagged_84]

This really flows well with the book I'm reading at the moment, The God Problem by Howard Bloom. This is an example of translation causing transformation, the movement of the gas molecules is a recruitment strategy that is dominate enough to cross between different, err things? The same pattern in the gas create a social/group activity when translated to humans. One of the examples given in the book outlines how bacterial colonies in Petri dishes spread out in fractal patterns just like those found in rocks.

It's a fairly stretched out book, I originally started reading it for his theory of the shape of our universe, a bagel. In theory it replaces dark energy with gravity to explain the accelerated burst and subsequent slow down experienced by the early universe as well as the missing anti-matter. 250 pages in and it's covered the history of science while explaining how we miss what's right under our nose, such as the Egyptians making perfect right angles using the golden ratio and never discovering the concept of angles. Highly recommend it!

Holy Crap! This changes EVERYTHING!

[VortexCortex]

The particles are Sentient, AND listen to Metal!

Re:Brainless matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, rely on stereotypes much? Not everyone who is in to Metal is empty headed. Some people actually just prefer the sound of grinding guitar and blast beats drums. Also, Anti-Intellectual? How exactly does musical preference infer that kind of stance?

Re:Brainless matter

[Hatta]

Not everyone who is in to Metal is empty headed.

True, many smart people have bad taste.

Hi, Heavy Metal fan here

[L4t3r4lu5]

s/Mosh Pit/Circle Pit/g;

They're different things. A mosh pit is where folk charge from the edge to the centre, and is pretty disorganised. Typically you'll find this with Death Metal, Speed Metal, and other very fast beat genres where there is no discernable difference between, say, verse and chorus. Circle Pits are the phenomenom being investigated here, where they start moving in a fairly ordered vortex around the centre, before moving into the centre when the band "drops the bass", then moves back to the circle when there's a "lull" (comparitively).

Hope this helps, science types.

Another one insulting from ignorance

[dbIII]

Instead you clearly have a very simplistic view of fluid flow. One very simple laminar flow experiment I saw in the 1980s needed a pipe the length of a reasonable sized University building to ensure that there wasn't turbulent flow at the outlet.

And Most Crowd Distaters are not due to Stampedes

[Diamonddavej]

And this reminds me of the Crowd Quake. Most crowd disasters are not due to Stampedes, where mass panic breaks out and people rush headlong into a choke point and get crushed. Researchers looking into the Love Parade Disaster discovered a hitherto unrecognised crowd dynamical process that can kill people in large crows - the Crowd Quake.

In normal crowds there's personal space between people, room to breath and move even a little bit. This personal space accommodates and cushions mass movement. However, at a critical point of density there's no personal space left and people are in full body contact. In this situation, mass movement efficiently transmits extreme forces through the crowd - the Crowd Quake. It's like changing a compressible gas into an incompressible solid, but people aren't incompressible. This is why crowd disasters happen so suddenly, it's like crystallisation from a gas.

See: Crowd Disasters as Systemic Failures: Analysis of the Love Parade Disaster http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.1886