While insects are small enough to use surface tension to stay atop water, larger species like the basilisk lizard run on water by slapping their feet against the surface hard enough to generate the force to stay above the surface. A. Minetti and colleagues won this year’s Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating that humans, too, can achieve this feat – when outfitted with stiff, large area fins and exposed to gravity less than 22% of Earth’s. The researchers adapted a model for the running lizard to human scales and then tested the model using subjects suspended by harness and running in place atop a wading pool while subjected to various lighter-than-earth simulated gravities. Both the model and experiment agreed that human muscles were unable to produce sufficient force to stay above the water at higher than 0.22g. Interestingly, the authors also observed that the water-running gait for both lizards and humans has more in common with the pedaling motion of cycling than a human’s bouncing gait for terrestrial running. (Video credit: A. Minetti et al.)
Tag: Ig Nobel Prize
Fluid Dynamics and the Nobel Prize
Last night marked the 2013 Ig Nobel Prize Award Ceremony, in which researchers are honored for work that “makes people LAUGH and then THINK”. Historically, the field of fluid dynamics has been well-represented at the Ig Nobels with some 13 winners across the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, and–yes–Fluid Dynamics since the awards were introduced in 1991. This is in stark contrast to the awards’ more famous cousins, the Nobel Prizes.
Since the introduction of the Nobel Prize in 1901, only two of the Physics prizes have been fluids-related: the 1970 prize for discoveries in magnetohydrodynamics and the 1996 prize for the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. Lord Rayleigh (a physicist whose name shows up here a lot) won a Nobel Prize in 1904, but not for his work in fluid dynamics. Another well-known Nobel laureate, Werner Heisenberg, actually began his career in fluid dynamics but quickly left it behind after his doctoral dissertation: “On the stability and turbulence of fluid flow.”
This is not to suggest that no fluid dynamicist has done work worthy of a Nobel Prize. Ludwig Prandtl, for example, revolutionized fluid dynamics with the concept of the boundary layer (pdf) in 1904 but never received the Nobel Prize for it, perhaps because the committee shied from giving the award for an achievement in classical physics. General consensus among fluid dynamicists is that anyone who can prove a solution for turbulence using the Navier-Stokes equation will likely receive a Nobel Prize in addition to a Millennium Prize. In the meantime, we carry on investigating fluids not for the chance at glory, but for the joy and beauty of the subject. (Image credits: Improbable Research and Wikipedia)
