The Safest Place During A Zombie Apocalypse?
Back in 2015 at the American Physical Society (APS) meeting in San Antonio, researchers from Cornell University presented a talk on Statistical Mechanics involving a zombie outbreak in the United States to a standing only room. Max Brooks’ book, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, inspired the researchers to run a real-world simulation of how a zombie virus outbreak as seen in Brooks’ book would play out in the real world. “Modeling zombies takes you through a lot of the techniques used to model real diseases, albeit in a fun context,” says Alex Alemi one of the graduate students who worked on the research with fellow graduate students. The simulation showed surprising results, in the simulation the zombie outbreak does not occur in many areas at once, it starts in New York City, the more likely place any major outbreak would arise in any major US city but the big apple was used in the test.
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