Umbrella Progress on a Crowded Sidewalk (podcast #96)

What happens when lots of people with umbrellas walk in opposite directions on a crowded sidewalk? A research study explores that very question, and we explore that study, in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.

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This week, Marc Abrahams discusses a published lotsa-people-walking-with-umbrellas study. Melissa Franklin, a Harvard physics professor who designed parts of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN — lends her voice, and her scientific expertise, and her opinions —with dramatic readings from a research study you may have overlooked.

For more info about what we discuss this week, go explore:

“Impact of Holding Umbrella on Uni- and Bi-Directional Pedestrian Flow: Experiments and Modeling,” Ning Guo, Qing-Yi Hao, Rui Jiang, Mao-Bin Hu, and Bin Jia, arXiv 1606.03434, December 21, 2015.

The mysterious John Schedler or the shadowy Bruce Petschek perhaps did the sound engineering this week.

The Improbable Research podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, on the CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes and Spotify).

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