Walking in a crowd, how do (and don’t) people go with the flow?

How don’t and do pedestrians collide? Ig Nobel Prize winner Alessandro Corbetta, a physicist based at Eindhoven University of Technology, explains, in this short video.

The 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi, for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians.

The team documented that research, in the study “Physics-based modeling and data representation of pairwise interactions among pedestrians,” Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper A. Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi, Physical Review E, vol. 98, no. 062310, 2018.