I thought for a second it was related to the recent '26-Second Pulse' XKCD https://xkcd.com/2344/ but that is about seismic waves while this is about atmospheric pressure.
Global wave discovery ends 220-year search
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Re: Global wave discovery ends 220-year search
#12Is there any scientific discovery with a longer gap between prediction and validation?
This 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.
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[0]: https://blackholecam.org/john-mitchell-developed-theory-of-b...
[1]: http://torontodreamsproject.blogspot.com/2012/01/very-first-...
[2]: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/4/19/how-scientists-c...
[3]: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-blac...
Re: Global wave discovery ends 220-year search
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you want to count Democritus and indivisible constituents of matter?
Holy 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 s…
Uncanny 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.
Re: Global wave discovery ends 220-year search
#14Not 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 b…
Oslo! I'm looking for a job, there. Think it's doable without speaking Norwegian?
Re: Global wave discovery ends 220-year search
#15Laplace 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.
What'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.
Re: Global wave discovery ends 220-year search
#16A 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.
Kind 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.
Re: Global wave discovery ends 220-year search
#17Not 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 b…
Oslo! I'm looking for a job, there. Think it's doable without speaking Norwegian?
Depends. 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.
Re: Global wave discovery ends 220-year search
#18Laplace 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.
What'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.
It'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.
Re: Global wave discovery ends 220-year search
#19What a great discovery. Is this going to have some kind of impact on weather models?
Re: Global wave discovery ends 220-year search
#20Not 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 b…
Oslo! I'm looking for a job, there. Think it's doable without speaking Norwegian?
Quite 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.