The Math of How Crickets, Starlings, and Neurons Sync Up
When the incoherent claps of a crowd suddenly become a pulse, as everyone starts clapping in unison, who decided? Quanta Magazine Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation, whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences. Yet the phenomenon went entirely undocumented until 1665, when the Dutch physicist and inventor Christiaan Huygens spent a few days sick in bed. A pair of new pendulum clocks—a kind of timekeeping device that Huygens invented—hung side by side on the wall. Huygens eventually inferred that the clocks’ “sympathy,” as he called it, resulted from the kicks that their swings gave each other through the wall.
