English physicist Robert Matthews, winner of the 1996 Ignobel Physics, explained in an interview with CNN Because we always have the impression that our line in the supermarket is slower than the others.
The phenomenon is quite common. You fill your shopping cart and carefully choose the line that looks faster, whether you have the least people or the one where consumers have fewer items to pass the cashier, to get rid of the task as fast as. While waiting, you often realize that you have made the wrong decision and another row goes faster than yours.
Aston University professor, located in Birmingham, Midwest of England, explains that the problem is the frame. When choosing a queue, you tend to compare it with those that are immediately on the right and left. That is, yours has only 33% chance of being the one that will walk fastest.
“All three lines are subject to random delays. They can’t find the price of something or people are trying to find their credit card. So, in any regular trip to the supermarket, all three lines that interest you, yours and both on each side, can have one of these delays,” explains Matthews.
“But the chances of the line you chose to overcome both your neighbors are only one in three. Only one will end first and it is likely not yours. It will be one or the other of your neighbors.”
The physique brings a mathematical solution so that the chances of your row to walk faster increases: you should choose the last row, which is in one corner of the supermarket, and therefore only has a neighboring line. Thus, its comparison universe is reduced and its chances increase from 33 to 50%.
“Your chances of overcoming your neighbor have increased from one in three to one in two, because there is only another line.”
He also explained that the same reasoning applies to the traffic lanes of a road. All of them are subject to the same randomness and therefore makes no sense that you are changing track without knowing what can cause a specific difference, such as an accident or something.
“If you are on the road and do not understand what is causing a delay in all three lines, it does not make much sense to jump to another. It is not worth trying to guess which one is spoiled,” argues the scientist.
Who is Robert Matthews?
The English physicist Robert Matthews was laureated with the 1996 Ignobel Physics Award for explaining Murphy’s law of the toast, that is, why a toast always tends to fall with the side of the butter down.
The Briton was born in the city of Carshalton, south of London and graduated in physics from the University of Oxford in 1991. He worked as a scientific dissemination journalist and currently joined the staff of Aston University, located in Birmingham, Midwest England.
In his work, Matthews used mathematics and physics to create an equation that explained Murphy’s law of the toast, which is named because it is an arm of Murphy’s famous law, which says everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
More recently, he was invited by Enterogermina to make the way back and. As the table must be 3 meters high for a toast to complete the turn, the physique decided to test different toast formats.
The solution was to choose a small, slightly lighter toast with a hole in the edge to prevent the toast from rotating when it reaches the edge of the surface.
Watch the video that explains the project:
