It turns out that military maneuvers can be modeled by the gas laws
In the invasion of Poland in 1939, Nazi Germany introduced the world to the Blitzkrieg, a flash war. This deadly military tactic was based on the concentration of attacks with tremendous firepower on a relatively small area, which caused confusion in the enemy's ranks and made it possible to break through his defense lines by surprise. Almost 80 years later, Russian physicists discovered that they could model this surprise tactic using a scientific law: the kinetic theory of gases.
With a little creative thought, the parallel is quite clear. Both armies and gases have densities: soldiers per square kilometer or atoms per cubic meter. The basic units of each of these entities also have a measurable cross section of action that defines their area coverage: for soldiers this is the average range of their weapons, for atoms in a gas this is the diameter of the electron cloud. In both entities, when the sections of the action overlap, conflicts arise. And finally, in the case of Blitzkrieg, the dispersion of the protective forces can be seen as analogous to gas atoms spaced apart.
Physicists Vladimir Aristov and Oleg Ilyin from the Russian Academy of Sciences collected historical military data about the German and Polish forces in World War II: the number of soldiers, tanks, planes, cannons, as well as the initial invasion speed of motorized vehicles. They replaced each military unit with gas molecules and placed in a mathematical model based on the kinetic theory of gases. Atoms or molecules of a gas that behave according to this model are scattered from point to point randomly and collide with each other with high frequency, but they can be ordered by forcing them to flow through a tube or orifice. In Aristob and Ilin's model, the German army was represented by a concentrated burst of gas atoms that quickly penetrated into a cloud of distant gas atoms, which represented the Polish army.
Calculations using the model, which simulated slowing the advance of the invading forces by collisions between the atoms, showed that the Germans had to advance 50 kilometers a day - exactly their actual rate of progress during their seven-day, 350-kilometer journey to Warsaw. The researchers also used the model on the Blitzkrieg against France in 1940 and the Battle of Stalingrad in 1941 and found that even in these cases the model's predictions corresponded to the real historical data of the movement of forces on the front. However, the model failed as soon as the initial blitz attack was over and protective units of atoms began to "fight" more effectively. The study was published in April 2015 in the journal Physical Review E.
There are many attempts to explain social-historical phenomena with the help of physics. For decades, scientists have been modeling events like the spread of the Black Death in the 14th century using slow diffusion models that were originally developed to explain processes like the random spread of an ink drop in a glass of water. The kinetic theory of gases, on the other hand, is more suitable for describing fast and direct processes, such as a military invasion. Illin argues that their model can be used to predict frontline movements in future wars, but only if the warring parties use conventional tactics and weapons, an unlikely assumption these days given the availability of nuclear weapons and drones.
The article was published with the permission of Scientific American Israel
