Three Belmont students and a physics faculty member, Dr. Davon Farrara, recently attended the The American Physical Society March Meeting, the largest international meeting of physicists in the world. Ferrara presented a poster titled, “West Coast Swing Dancing as a Driven Harmonic Oscillator Model”.
The research was conducted with Belmont students Marie Holzer and Shirley Kyere during the 2016 Belmont summer SURFs program. In this project, they hypothesized that a driven harmonic oscillator model can be used to better understand the interaction between two west coast swing dancers since the “stiffness” of the physical connection between dance partners is a known factor in the dynamics of the dance.
The APS March Meeting brought together more than 10,000 attendees, 105 invited sessions and approximately 600 contributing sessions where more than 8,100 papers were presented.