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Global wave discovery ends 220-year search
- quercusa 6y agoIs there any scientific discovery with a longer gap between prediction and validation?
- bitdizzy 6y agoDo you want to count Democritus and indivisible constituents of matter?
- mehrdadn 6y agoHoly cow, he predicted way more than just indivisible constituents of matter [1]: > The theory of Democritus held that everything is composed of "atoms", which are physically, but not geometrically, indivisible; that between atoms, there lies empty space; that atoms are indestructible, and have always been and always will be in motion; that there is an infinite number of atoms and of kinds of atoms, which differ in shape and size. The accuracy is uncanny. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus#Atomic_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus#Atomic_hypothesis
- pmiller2 6y agoUncanny indeed, especially when you consider that Democritus's understanding of atoms is a mostly sufficient underpinning for the science of chemistry, at least up through the end of the 19th century.
- klyrs 6y agoLacking evidence, scientists didn't accept Democritus's model continued to speculate. My favorite being the "plum pudding" model proposed by JJ Thompson in 1904.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago> that there is an infinite number of atoms and of kinds of atoms Well, that bit is wrong. Especially if you take the fundamental constituents of what are now called atoms: 6 quarks, 6 antiquarks, 6 leptons (counting neutrinos), 6 antileptons, 5 gauge bosons, 1 scalar boson. Only 30, possibly + whatever dark matter and dark energy are.
- mehrdadn 6y agoWe don't know how many kinds of atoms there are, and infinite is pretty damn accurate all things considered. And it's pretty disingenuous to go out of your way to take quarks to mean what he called atoms just so you can claim he's wrong.
- pierrec 6y agoThey're just trying to be accurate. The most important aspect of Democritus' atoms is indivisibility, so that's why fundamental particles like quarks are technically a better fit.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoAre you seriously suggesting that when Democritus referred to "uncuttable things", he meant to describe particles that would in the future be named after his work rather than to describe particles that were indivisible?
- mehrdadn 6y agoIf you genuinely find that interpretation of my statement plausible then I don't really have anything to add.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoHere's your statement: > And it's pretty disingenuous to go out of your way to take quarks to mean what he called atoms just so you can claim he's wrong. You can try to identify atoms by his description of them, in which case you'd have to choose fundamental particles. But you've already explicitly chosen to interpret Democritus' "atoms" as identical with our "atoms", despite the fact that they do not exhibit any of the characteristics Democritus described. What can I conclude except that you think Democritus, in the past, named his concept after ours, in the future?
- melling 6y agoI guess the prediction was made in his 1798 book: https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/traite-de-mecanique-celeste https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/traite-de-mecani... John Adams was the second US President. 5.3 million people lived in America. Makes me want to learn more math.
- limomium 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_experiment
- pmiller2 6y agoThis isn't a longer gap, but I think it's interesting. Black holes were first hypothesized by someone named John Mitchell in 1783 [0]. Interestingly enough, and back on topic for the article, Laplace also independently came to the same conclusion in 1796 [0]. It's a little fuzzy as to when black holes were "discovered": most sources say 1971, when Charles Bolton identified Cygnus X-1 as a black hole by measuring its mass indirectly using the wobble of nearby star HBE226868 [1], but the first image of a black hole was only taken in 2019 [2]. Yes, it looked just like in Interstellar, because Kip Thorne consulted on the film [3]. The gap from 1783-1971 is "only" 188 years, but 1783-2019 is 236 years. And, from Laplace's rediscovery of the idea, it's 175 and 223 years, respectively. I think that's pretty cool, too. --- [0]: https://blackholecam.org/john-mitchell-developed-theory-of-black-holes-already-in-1783 https://blackholecam.org/john-mitchell-developed-theory-of-b... [1]: http://torontodreamsproject.blogspot.com/2012/01/very-first-black-hole-ever-discovered.html http://torontodreamsproject.blogspot.com/2012/01/very-first-... [2]: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/4/19/how-scientists-captured-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/4/19/how-scientists-c... [3]: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-blac...
- ChuckMcM 6y agoLaplace had an amazing mind. He connected so many dots, and everything I've done in the last four years with respect to digital signal processing ends up rooted in something he discovered or postulated or analyzed. Fascinating, but not too surprising, that he shows up in the weather as well.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoWhat's more amazing is that all his math was done with pen and paper - no computer assistance of any kind. Log tables were available, but all the analysis was done by hand. And brain.
- jacquesm 6y agoIt's a bit like chess the old fashioned way or by using a special purpose computer. If you have limited processing power your optimization heuristic becomes that much more important. At a guess Laplace was very good at choosing what to work on and how to tackle it leading to relatively few computations but all of those contributing to the result. Our current brute force approach discards the vast majority of the results generated.
- api 6y agoIt may in some ways have helped. It forces deep concentration and prioritizes simple and elegant solutions over needlessly complex ones. Information technology is powerful but I sometimes wonder if we are grossly misusing it.
- btrettel 6y agoMost of the time people are impressed by analytical skills, it's not really justified in my view. Those skills aren't taught as much as they used to be. You can still pick them up, but it's mostly on your own now. (Probably still easier than Laplace had it, though.) Anyway, just skimming the article, it sounds like Laplace simply applied standard normal mode analysis for the wave equation in the atmosphere. This is rather basic stuff that you can learn in an undergraduate partial differential equations class. In my Master's (8 years ago), I took a class on perturbation methods and asymptotic expansions (e.g., "method of matched asymptotic expansions"). These are approximation methods that were very common before computers became mainstream and can be very accurate. These methods are becoming rarer and rarer in fluid dynamics. I think they're still used extensively in theoretical quantum mechanics.
- kebman 6y agoNot sure if it's completely related, but I found the phenomena of the North Atlantic Oscillation [1] to be particulary useful in predicting long-term weather around the South of Norway. This time around, in December 2019, I predicted a rather cold summer in Norway. I made that prediction because the winter was particularly warm and snow-less in the South East between late 2019 and early 2020. For the most part I've been correct. Except a few heat waves this summer has been pretty cold. But the effects of global warming persists, and it would seem the Autumn will be pretty nice here in Oslo. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_oscillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_oscillation
- CtrlD-me 6y agoOslo! I'm looking for a job, there. Think it's doable without speaking Norwegian?
- kebman 6y agoDepends. Some companies do accept English speakers, but not all. I'd call them up about it before applying. Most accept Danish or Swedish, though. If you're just looking for a restaurant job, then most of them accept English only speakers. But that isn't to say that most customers do, so it helps to know at least the basics for your spesific trade. Sad fact: Norwegian is known to be notoriously hard to learn because most Norwegians resort to English with foreigners. So even if you come here, you might not hear the local language enough to actually learn it well.
- laurencerowe 6y agoQuite a few tech companies in Norway have an international staff and speak English in the office. I worked for a small Norway-based open source consultancy for a while. We spoke English in the office as most of us were not Norwegian and most Norwegian customers were happy to work with us in English. I spent some time working with QT Software (then part of Nokia) and their office was also English speaking IIRC.
- stainforth 6y agoCan hurricane models incorporate these in some useful way? (If they aren't already)
- DiffEq 6y agoPythagoros and Plato, while not making a direct proposal like Laplace, had some similar intuitions.
- DiffEq 6y agoA friend of mine wondered what the RATIO between the four modes of pressure waves are. Waves are essentially a frequency (like pitch), and he was wondering if the ratio between these “frequencies” constitute a similar ratio between the pitches in a chord.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoKind of. Technically these are spherical harmonics, which are the generalisation of the harmonic series on a sphere instead of a line - also used in quantum theory to calculate orbitals. The math is a bit more complex than the simple harmonic series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_harmonics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_harmonics
- sytse 6y agoI thought for a second it was related to the recent '26-Second Pulse' XKCD https://xkcd.com/2344/ https://xkcd.com/2344/ but that is about seismic waves while this is about atmospheric pressure.
- jacquesm 6y agoWhat a great discovery. Is this going to have some kind of impact on weather models?
- julienchastang 6y agoThis is not really a "discovery" so much as a reaffirmation of what was previously known. The original paper is more insightful [1]. The Quanta magazine article is interesting but the title overstates the original citation. [1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/jas/article/77/7/2519/347483/An-Array-of-Ringing-Global-Free-Modes-Discovered https://journals.ametsoc.org/jas/article/77/7/2519/347483/An...