Weird Science Wednesday again. This week we mostly discussed rollercoaster science on George Lamb’s show (47 minutes in). That’s because I went to Thorpe Park on Monday: thrills all round.
Rollercoaster design is an ongoing, and pretty lucrative (I imagine) scientific discipline. It didn’t start out well, though.
Coney Island's first loop-the-loop coaster made its debut in 1895, but the first intrepid passengers disembarked rather unamused: they had suffered whiplash injuries and broken collar bones on the way round. Loops have to be elliptical, not circular, to ease the forces on the body.
Then, in 1902, Coney Island’s Cannon Coaster came online. The original idea was that the cars would use their momentum to make a death-defying leap over a missing section of track. However, on a breezy day, they often missed.
Today, interestingly, rollercoasters are about as good as they can get, in terms of what kinds of forces the human body can take (and enjoy). But that doesn’t stop researchers trying to go further.
In pursuit of the perfect sensation, researchers have rotated volunteers head over heels while also making them cartwheel or pirouette like a ballet dancer. It turns out that if you move on all three axes of rotation at the same time, even air force pilots are close to blackout when they get off. You can't walk, and you’ll have headaches that last for days. This is not what theme park designers are after.
The Holy Grail, something rollercoaster designers have never managed to recreate in a coaster, is the Coriolis illusion. Kids get it while rolling down a grassy bank. Basically it’s when you tilt the head while spinning with the eyes closed, and suddenly, an intense tumbling sensation. Apparently it’s fascinating, and rather enjoyable. It’s all to do with what the fluid in your inner ear is doing.
The trouble is, when it goes wrong, it’s a nightmare. Aircraft pilots know all about this: when they are doing a big wide turn, if they suddenly look down at their instruments with their head at the wrong angle, they get the sensation of tumbling. It’s like they’re falling out of the sky. Then they automatically try to correct for it, and send the plane into a nightmare spin.
The problem with going further means that the ride of the future is not more demanding physically, but psychologically. The people at Thorpe Park reckon the only way forward is psychological, like the Saw ride. But there are other ways of scaring you: Make it unpredictable: chaotic, where the ride you have will depend on the weight and distribution of the people in your car.
Even worse, though, is the idea of a passenger-decided ride, with switching paths that will depend on how everybody on the coaster votes. Though some people might want to take the easy path, there’ll always be some who want to push things further. At Thorpe Park I discovered my wife to be a total thrillseeker: she sat next to me cackling and whooping while I wore my mask of terror. In a passenger vote system, I’d take the next ride after her…
My thought for the day was short and sweet. Which do you think is the biggest number - the number of cells in your brain or the total number of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way?
The brain wins! I think that’s pretty impressive.
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