Crowd Movement Follows a Vortex Pattern, Physicists Find
Crowds don’t move chaotically—physicists from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France) have shown that large groups of people form rotating vortices instead.
The researchers analyzed crowd dynamics during the San Fermín festival in Spain, using balcony-mounted cameras and computational models. Unlike previous studies that treated crowds as clusters of individual agents, they modeled the crowd as a dense, fluid-like continuum.
As the crowd filled the square, it reached a critical density of 4 people per square meter, triggering the slow formation of overlapping vortices. When density rose to 9 people per square meter, new vortices appeared every 18 seconds. Interestingly, participants were likely unaware they were moving in circles.
🔗 Study in Nature
Crowds don’t move chaotically—physicists from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France) have shown that large groups of people form rotating vortices instead.
The researchers analyzed crowd dynamics during the San Fermín festival in Spain, using balcony-mounted cameras and computational models. Unlike previous studies that treated crowds as clusters of individual agents, they modeled the crowd as a dense, fluid-like continuum.
As the crowd filled the square, it reached a critical density of 4 people per square meter, triggering the slow formation of overlapping vortices. When density rose to 9 people per square meter, new vortices appeared every 18 seconds. Interestingly, participants were likely unaware they were moving in circles.
🔗 Study in Nature