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Seven years to the next 9/11,
physicists predict
Posted Feb. 25, 2005
Special to World Science
Statistical laws suggest a terrorist attack deadlier than the World Trade Center disaster will occur within seven years, if current trends continue, two researchers say.
The conclusion comes from an examination of past statistics of terrorist events, combined with a few mathematical maneuvers.
The prediction was possible, the researchers added, because as senseless, random and emotional as human outbursts of violence seem, they actually follow laws as dull and predictable as the laws of gravity.
Terrorism and wars both follow similar laws, the researchers found. And based on them, one can calculate how likely it is that a given attack will kill a given number of people. Knowing how often an attack occurs anywhere—which is every 17 hours on average—a few more mathematical steps lead to a calculation of how long it will take before an attack will kill “X” number of people or more.
“To extract and understand these patterns, we use extremal statistics,” a special sub-field of statistics, the researchers wrote in a paper explaining their
findings. The researchers, Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young, are with the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, N.M.
Terrorism and war both follow mathematical patterns, the researchers found, called power laws. A simple example of a power law is a rule that has been found to govern earthquakes: for each tenfold increase in a quake’s strength, the there is a tenfold decrease in the frequency of a quake of that strength. Similar laws govern the length of streams, solar flares and many other phenomena.
Objects that follow power laws also exhibit a distinctive property called scale invariance, meaning they look similar no matter from what distance you view them.
Young and Clauset reached their conclusions after studying statistics on terrorist attacks worldwide between 1968 and 2004. The statistics come from a database of the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City, U.S.A.
The researchers said they were surprised to learn, from these statistics, that the patterns of terrorism follow similar laws to those followed by war, first described by the pacifist scientist Lewis Fry Richardson in the late 1940s.
Other scientists offered cautious praise for Young and Clauset’s work.
“I have to say I was quite skeptical at first," Cosma Shalizi, a physicist at the University of Michigan who helped Clauset with the work, told Physics Web, an Internet publication. He added that although he still has some quibbles with the findings, “this is definitely very careful and important work, and deserves to be taken quite
seriously.”
—EJL
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