5 Seemingly Random Things Science Can Predict
The world can feel so overwhelming sometimes, with all of its choices and ambiguity, which is probably why people who didn’t take the Coward of Arts path in school retreat into science. When life feels chaotic, science is always there to offer reliability and predictability — even about things that feel chaotic. Such as…
Crowds
If you’ve ever experienced a music festival or Super Bowl or normal sidewalk in New York City, you probably felt like the plastic bag in American Beauty, being pushed this way and that and inevitably the most beautiful thing some weirdo has ever seen. But scientists have found that, given enough space and limiting travel to two directions, crowds of people behave in very predictable ways. Specifically, they spread out across the space and then form oppositional lanes, and if their mothers taught them any manners, those lanes form to the right.
Mosh Pits
Mosh pits seem like the definition of chaos, and that’s not untrue. But lots of predictable things are chaotic — like gas particles. In fact, mosh pits closely mimic the movement of gas particles according to the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution model, in which “particles move freely without interacting with one another, except for very brief elastic collisions in which they may exchange momentum and kinetic energy, but do not change their respective states of intramolecular excitation.”
You can pretty much map out exactly where everyone is going in the mosh pit this way, but you should still wear a mouthguard just in case.
The Distribution of Colors in a Bag of M&Ms
You’d think they’d have more pressing concerns, but scientists have been tracking the proportions of different colors of M&Ms produced by the Mars company for decades. (This is apparently not random, but the information isn’t always publicly available, either.) As a result, they can tell you, for example, that in every handful you grab out of the office candy jar, you’re likely to get way more greens than reds, probably due to woke.
Dice
It’s our culture’s number-one metaphor for random selection, but in 2012, the American Institute of Physics announced that you can predict a roll of the dice. The catch is that you do have to know the exact values of a bunch of different conditions, but theoretically, under the purest of circumstances, a die is most likely to land face-up on the side that faced down when it was thrown. Get ready to hit it big in Vegas, provided you have air-bending capabilities.
Random Number Generators
Right? It’s right there in the title. But any random number generator that was programmed to do so cannot by definition be truly random. There will always be some underlying pattern to its algorithm because that’s, you know, what an algorithm is. It’s usually undetectable enough to be sufficient for its purposes, but if you want a truly random number, you would actually be better off asking a human. Suck it, computers.
