Pier Oddone with his wife, Barbara, at the inauguration. Photo courtesy of Fermilab Today
Now here's a view of the inauguration you won't hear from the pundits. It's from Fermilab director Pier Oddone, who was with his wife among the crowd on the National Mall:
In a multitude such as yesterday’s and with long waits, a physicist’s mind wanders. First, as the crush of people funnels for hours through the security choke points, individuals no longer the masters of their own directions but rather part of fluid flow, the mind calculates whether there is enough time for this fluid to make it through the gates before the President’s address. After an hour in the frigid weather, the mind wonders what the equilibrium temperature of ones toes might be after five more hours. Eventually the mind gets to a higher plane. How many different hopes do a million people in the mall and the many millions more throughout the country carry with them and how in the world will they be accommodated when the “hard choices” have to be made?
In his column today in Fermilab Today, Oddone goes on to say:
The answer was in the President’s address, calling us to come together and put our shoulders to the task of solving the myriad problems we confront. A physicist would call this coherence, and would understand instantly that coherent phenomena grow as the square of the number of individual elements involved. Is the power of a million people acting coherently a million times what an individual can achieve or a trillion times more effective as in fully coherent behavior? Did we win WWII in four years when now it takes us four years on the preliminaries before breaking ground while following project management order 413.3? In the last few years we have seen first hand the power of incoherence as political fights jammed initiatives not only in the physical sciences but much more broadly. While looking at a million people, listening to President Obama’s words and imagining that we could act coherently as a nation, nothing seemed impossible.
Physics Buzz approaches the historic event from another angle:
The news is reporting that close to 2 million people crowded the lawn of the National Mall for the inauguration of Barack Obama. At the end of the ceremony, the throngs of people surged out seeking to get somewhere warm. I know because I was right in the middle of it, caught up in the flow.
That's what fluid dynamics is, the study of the flow of liquids or large numbers of particles, or even large crowds of people. Whenever there is a whole bunch of anything moving together, like a running river or an avalanche, certain patterns and organizations tend to emerge. Areas with a smooth flow or turbulence can be predicted accuratly based on the fluid's properties like viscosity or particle size.
We're waiting to hear how Bose-Einstein condensates or supersymmetry might figure in.
