Could studying ants reveal clues to reducing highway traffic jams? Physicist Apoorva Nagar at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology thinks the answer is yes. Nagar says he got interested in the topic when he came across a study by German and Indian researchers showing that ants running along a path were able to maintain a steady speed even when there were a large number of ants on the path. Nagar says there are three main reasons ants dont jam up. Number one, ants dont have egos. They dont show off by zooming past people. The second thing is, they do not mind a few accidents, or collisions, say Nagar. So unless theres a serious pileup, they just keep going. The third reason, he says, is that ants seem to get more disciplined when paths get crowded, running in straighter lines, and varying their speed less. Theyre less likely to make unexpected moves in this sort of heavy traffic. Its the kind of steady control you see when a computer is controlling a car rather than a human. Theres less variability unless its absolutely called for. Nagar felt this kind of behavior could be explained by something called the Langevin equation, an equation physicists use when describing the movement of liquids, or how individual atoms behave in a lattice.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 11:06:43 +0000
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