Self-organizing processes: The sound of many hands clapping

An audience expresses appreciation for a good performance by the strength and nature of its applause. The thunder of applause at the start often turns quite suddenly into synchronized clapping, and this synchronization can disappear and reappear several times during the applause. The phenomenon is a delightful expression of social self-organization that provides an example on a human scale of the synchronization processes that occur in numerous natural systems, ranging from flashing Asian fireflies to oscillating chemical reactions. Here we explain the dynamics of this rhythmic applause.

• Publication year

  2000

• Venue

  Nature

• Publication date

  2000-02-24

• Fields of study

  Physics, Computer Science, History, Psychology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/35002660arXiv cond-mat/0003001PMID 10706271
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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