This article suffers from serious Chinese whispers. The clickbait title doesn't reflect the conclusions of the article, which don't reflect the conclusions of

This article suffers from serious Chinese whispers. The clickbait title doesn't reflect the conclusions of the article, which don't reflect the conclusions of the paper, which don't reflect the actual evidence given by the simplistic experiment that the physicist responsible for it decided to use to model the real-world system. The guy who wrote the paper was doing some sensible academic research that really should have had no conclusions - it just worked towards a new facet that should be used when modelling transport systems in cities, which is perfectly commendable and useful, but can't be relied on as a standalone system (in the same way that you couldn't model all of the interactions in the universe using only magnetism). Deciding to draw the conclusion that he could predict an optimal speed for the underground to move at was foolish and detracts from the original paper (although I'm sure it garnered it much more attention). That the guy is quoted at the end of the article admitting that his conclusions are evidently nonsense and that they should probably throw in some "secondary terms to account for complications he just thought of" is almost too perfect. https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/