Amusement parks are excellent laboratories of physics, not only to check physical laws, but also to
investigate if those physical laws might also be applied to human behaviour. A group of Physics
Engineering students from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya has investigated if human behaviour,
when driving bumper cars, can be modelled using tools borrowed from the analysis of molecular
dynamics simulations, such as the radial and angular distribution functions. After acquiring several
clips and obtaining the coordinates of the cars, those magnitudes are computed and analysed.
Additionally, an analogous hard disks system is simulated to compare its distribution functions to
those obtained from the cars’ coordinates. Despite the clear difference between bumper cars and a
hard disk-like particle system, the obtained distribution functions are very similar. This suggests
that there is no important effect of the individuals in the collective behaviour of the system in
terms of struc…