Please be seated A faster way of boarding planes could save time
and money THE job of the professional astrophysicist is to
contemplate the music of the spheres. Given the global nature of
modern science, however, today's astrophysicists often spend
just as much time confronting the cacophony of the airport. Now,
one of them has devised a way to make that experience a little
less tedious. Jason Steffen, from Fermilab, near Chicago, has
designed and experimentally tested a faster method of boarding
aeroplanes. By his calculation, it could save airlines hundreds
of millions of dollars a year. Dr Steffen spends his time
thinking about such things as extrasolar planets, dark matter
and cosmology. After waiting in a particularly long queue to
board a flight, though, he began to harbour an interest in the
mechanics of getting people on to planes. In 2008 he wrote a
computer simulation to test different methods. Using a numerical
technique familiar to him from his day job, he was able to find
what looked like the be