The professor in a Physics class asked his students to go wide open in writing a paper on Special Topics. In this case, they chose calculating how long it will take for a Zombie infection to turn everyone on Earth into the undead. (Science Daily: 'Zombie apocalypse' would wipe out humankind in just 100 days, students calculate)
We get it that the students are plotting what happens with any immediately deadly viral epidemic but they wanted to have some fun with it and the paper was the result.
Assuming that a zombie can find one person each day, with a 90 per cent chance of infecting victims with the zombie infection, the students from the University of Leicester Department of Physics and Astronomy suggest that by day one hundred there be just 273 remaining human survivors, outnumbered a million to one by zombies.
- SD
Right away, we have a math problem since there are far more than 273 million people walking about the Earth. The students account for that since there are three stages to the infection.
As part of the formula, the students looked at S (the susceptible population), Z (the zombie population) and D (the dead population), suggesting that the average lifespan of a zombie would be S to Z to D.
- SD
Ed: maybe it works if the Zombie to Dead time is extremely short.
Yep. It looks like we're screwed.
The calculation of the students is that it will take one hundred days so if we assume the infection begins on January 20 then most of us should be dead or at least undead by May Day.
The students returned to the study and made it a little less pessimistic by adding some more variables.
However, in a more hopeful follow-up study, the students investigated the SIR model applied to a zombie epidemic and introduced new parameters, such as the rate in which zombies might be killed and people having children within the nightmare scenario. This made human survival more feasible.
The team factored in how over time survivors may also be less likely to become infected after having experience of avoiding or fending off zombies.
Student paper 'A Zombie Epidemic': https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/view/956/679
Student paper 'Another Zombie Epidemic': https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/view/965/683
Read an article on why it is important to make physics and science education relevant and accessible to the public here: http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/think-leicester/education/2015/zany-science-projects-help-students-learn-how-to-communicate-research-findings
We get it that the students are plotting what happens with any immediately deadly viral epidemic but they wanted to have some fun with it and the paper was the result.
Assuming that a zombie can find one person each day, with a 90 per cent chance of infecting victims with the zombie infection, the students from the University of Leicester Department of Physics and Astronomy suggest that by day one hundred there be just 273 remaining human survivors, outnumbered a million to one by zombies.
- SD
Right away, we have a math problem since there are far more than 273 million people walking about the Earth. The students account for that since there are three stages to the infection.
As part of the formula, the students looked at S (the susceptible population), Z (the zombie population) and D (the dead population), suggesting that the average lifespan of a zombie would be S to Z to D.
- SD
Ed: maybe it works if the Zombie to Dead time is extremely short.
Yep. It looks like we're screwed.
The calculation of the students is that it will take one hundred days so if we assume the infection begins on January 20 then most of us should be dead or at least undead by May Day.
The students returned to the study and made it a little less pessimistic by adding some more variables.
However, in a more hopeful follow-up study, the students investigated the SIR model applied to a zombie epidemic and introduced new parameters, such as the rate in which zombies might be killed and people having children within the nightmare scenario. This made human survival more feasible.
The team factored in how over time survivors may also be less likely to become infected after having experience of avoiding or fending off zombies.
- SD
We have a major hat tip for the prof who sparked this creativity.
Course tutor, Dr Mervyn Roy, a lecturer in the University of Leicester's Department of Physics and Astronomy, said: "Every year we ask students to write short papers for the Journal of Physics Special Topics. It lets the students show off their creative side and apply some of physics they know to the weird, the wonderful, or the everyday."
Student paper 'Another Zombie Epidemic': https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/view/965/683
Read an article on why it is important to make physics and science education relevant and accessible to the public here: http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/think-leicester/education/2015/zany-science-projects-help-students-learn-how-to-communicate-research-findings
- SD
This style of teaching is something my ol' Dad enjoyed as well. He taught a course in Evolution for the last year of undergraduate work and he required a course paper but he left the topic wide open ... except ... you must justify whatever premise you're trying to demonstrate.
In one example, a student came up with the evolutionary changes necessary to accommodate working wings for humans. The paper went into meticulous detail including the increase required of the sternum to anchor the musculature necessary to work the wings, hollowing of bones the way birds do it to reduce weight, etc. It was a fantastic piece of work and the word means much more than 'really good.'
Hat tip, Dr Roy. With Roy and his Zombie parties plus my ol' Dad with his Death parties, those clowns would be a riot if you add a bottle of gin.
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