An Italian has won an international physics award for proving that people would be able to walk on water. Well only on the Moon!
Alberto Minetti, a professor of physiology at the University of Milan, and his colleagues won the IG Nobel Prize for physics for demonstrating that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond – if those people and that pond were on the moon. This research had already been published by Plos One journal in 2012 and won the 2013 IG Nobel Prize for physics.
The scientists had to go through the “enormously goofy kind of slapstick engineering,” with a man in flippers suspended above the water in a giant baby bouncer. The flippers helped the person imitate the Basilisk lizard, famed for running on water, while the baby bouncer enabled scientists to adjust the person’s weight. Though the experiment looks highly entertaining, it also proved a scientific point.
Concluding their findings, the scientists said that “a hydrodynamic model of lizards running on water can also be applied to humans, despite the enormous difference in body size and morphology”. As a result, if an athletic human happened to find themselves by a pond on the moon, where there is less gravity, they would be able to walk on water. More here!
