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The Physics of a Zombie Attack
Physicist Davide Cassi at the Università di Parma in Italy recently studied how long something could hide (an immobile target) in a complex structure without being found by a random walker. To Mike Lucibella at livescience.com, “immobile targets” are humans hiding and “random walkers” are zombies. Lucibella infers from Cassi’s study that if zombies were to attack that your best course of action (assuming you don’t want to go out fighting) is to find the most complex structure, like a mall or a school, near to you and hide. Of course this is all assuming that you are not dealing with a type of zombie that can sniff out live humans or ones that really like hide and seek.
From Cassi’s paper:
The survival probability of immobile targets annihilated by a population of random walkers on inhomogeneous discrete structures, such as disordered solids, glasses, fractals, polymer networks, and gels, is analytically investigated. It is shown that, while it cannot in general be related to the number of distinct visited points as in the case of homogeneous lattices, in the case of bounded coordination numbers its asymptotic behavior at large times can still be expressed in terms of the spectral dimension
and its exact analytical expression is given. The results show that the asymptotic survival probability is site-independent of recurrent structures (
2), while on transient structures (
I don’t know a lot about physics. In fact I don’t know how Cassi got the results he did but, I do know zombie movies. Hiding in complex structures may lengthen your life in an attack but the zombies will eventually find you. In a zombie attack, your best defense is always a good offense. So, make a run to the lawn and garden section and grab some weapons before hiding under the counter at the Orange Julius.
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6 comments for “The Physics of a Zombie Attack”
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Nice post Katie. I totally agree, hiding will presumably end with you starving to death. To paraphrase the cop in There’s nothing worse than sitting around waiting to die.
Let’s get some sharp objects and go down fighting.
BTW, check this out for more zombies in the news:
Oh man, my HTML is messed. I meant to attach this link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8206280.stm
I recommend seeking out distance weapons over melee weapons just in case the zombie disease is communicated via their juices. Pop culture has taught me that a sharp blow to the noggin can produce quite a bit of spray.
Most importantly, eschew machine guns in favor of semiautomatics. A lined-up headshot is critical; a panicked spray does nothing. This was the cause of the disaster at Yonkers.
Fortunately, Max Brooks has taught me everything I need to know about this, so I feel prepared.
And Joel has a battle-axe, so he’s my best bud when the dead rise.
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/gallery/bestzombiemovies/
Nice. I’m glad Fulci is on there with “Zombie”; the shark bit was surreal, even by zombie standards. Romero’s original “Night” and “Dawn” are in their proper places, though “Land” shouldn’t be on there at all: it was embarrassing and devoid of any bit of fun. “28 Weeks Later” got shafted. And I guess they don’t count “Black Sheep” as a zombie movie; it was better then “Land”.
I’ll have to quibble with their idea that Billy Connelly in “Fido” plays the best zombie-with-a-personality character. That’s gotta be Howard Sherman as Bub in “Day”. He manages to be the most sympathetic and likable character in the whole film without the benefit of the whole thing being about his cuteness, as was the case with Connelly in “Fido”.
But mostly the list is spot on. It reminds me that I still need to see Peter Jackson’s earlier squick-out stuff.