Click to play videoBangalore: Dr Sriram Ramaswamy won the Infosys Prize 2011 for Physical Sciences. He used his knowledge of theoretical physics to crack a question commonly asked in biology. Thanks to his research, we now have answers to some of the mysteries of the laws of nature.
How does a flock of birds move in perfect harmony? Or a herd of animals?
Dr Sriram Ramaswamy replied, "There is this Hindi word 'bhedchaal', that is what this phenomenon is all about. It's bhedchaal but bhedchaal with a lot of mathematical add-ons. So you would want to understand the laws governing how crowds of objects move together."
Dr Ramaswamy was curious how such crowds of living objects behave in a fluid.
"If you are in a fluid, then suppose you are moving fast and you slow down, when you slow down, that momentum is imparted to the fluid. That sends a disturbance through the fluid which affects others," Dr Ramaswamy explained.
From large schools of fish, Dr Ramaswamy zoomed into the microscopic world, to the collections of swimming bacteria. He found that even tiny moving bodies subtly disturb the fluid around them. In return, the subtle ripples they create cause them to clump together, and create complex disturbances in the way they are arranged.
So basically, the physics that governs movement in a fluid produces patterns in the movement of brainless bacteria and even at a smaller scale, in the filaments inside a single living cell. But the question is why should one care.
Dr Ramaswamy said, "The possible applications potentially eventually include a proper understanding of physics of cells such as in tissue or it could be an understanding of how bacteria form colonies. It could be, if you understand principles then you could imitate them, you could make little objects that can move themselves, may be you can make little objects that can follow chemical tracers, can follow cells, can turn to the right direction."
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