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[What's Burning?]

I saw this on NPR today and had to share.

Full Article and a SIMULATOR!

Physics and heavy metal don't seem to have a lot in common, but Matt Bierbaum and Jesse Silverberg have found a connection. Both are graduate students at Cornell University. They're also metal heads who enjoy going to concerts and hurling themselves into mosh pits full of like-minded fans.

About five years ago Silverberg took his girlfriend to her first gig. "Usually I would jump in the mosh pit," he says. "But this time I wanted her to be safe and have a good time, so we stayed out on the side and watched things from there."

While he was watching, he realized that the motion of people in a mosh pit looks kind of like molecules moving in a gas.

"It was basically just this random mess of collisions, which is essentially how you want to think about the gas in the air that we breathe," he says.

Physicists have worked out the basic rules that describe this kind of motion, so Bierbaum and Silverberg decided to look for the rules of motion in moshing. They went to concerts and studied videos from YouTube. Silverberg emphasizes that no tax dollars went toward buying concert tickets — the study is a labor of love.