Onorato and Brandini are already at work when we arrive. They are standing on a steel footbridge raised several feet above the water, with an impressive bank of controls and computer terminals. Below, the water in the dark wave tank is so clear and still that it reflects without distortion the array of fluorescent ceiling fixtures above. Staring into the tank from the bridge, I have to keep reminding myself that I’m looking at water.
For the next few days this will be Osborne’s private ocean. He’ll be both Aeolus and Neptune, but his ability to create walls of water will depend solely on the soundness of his physics. Rogues are more events than waves, he believes. They arise from the unstable energy present in otherwise normal waves, like a monstrous sound blaring suddenly from the predictable harmonics of an orchestra. Osborne believes that he can make such waves appear when and where he wants. And if he can do that, perhaps he can predict their occurrence in the real world. “We’re going to be making magic,” he says.
TOY BOAT, TOY BOAT
In a wave tank at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, a three-foot-long model ship is effortlessly capsized by a simulated rogue wave. In real seas, waves like these sink one supertanker or freighter every year.
Osborne has studied rogue waves for 20 years, but physicists have known about them for much longer than that. In 1832 the Scottish engineer John Scott Russell was riding along a canal in Edinburgh when he saw a bow wave form behind a horse-drawn canal boat. It moved “at great velocity,” he later reported at the 1844 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, “assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a well-defined heap of water which continued its course along the channel.” Russell followed the wave on horseback for nearly two miles. It never changed shape or slowed down.
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The sight would obsess Russell for the rest of his life. “He was going around talking about a column of water that propagates itself,” Osborne says. “Miraculous. But it nearly destroyed his career. It took 70 years before it was solved. And it was solved like a problem in quantum mechanics. This beast, this solitary wave, this soliton, as they called it, was behaving like a particle.”
FUZZY BEAST
In the 3-D computer simulation below, a rogue wave rises suddenly from turbulent waters during an ocean storm. The wave crest (in red) towers a full 90 feet above mean sea level. Physicist Alfred Osborne views such monster waves as “fuzzy beasts lying between sine waves and solitons.” But unlike solitons, which generally travel great distances without losing speed or changing shape,rogue waves can remain hidden behind a background of random waves (blue and green), only to rise up with sudden violence.Solitons defy Newtonian logic. They are coherent structures that somehow emerge from a random background—structures with properties far different from those of the waves around them. When a soliton is moving fast, it can overtake a smaller soliton and pass through it unchanged. Since Russell’s discovery, scientists have found solitons everywhere there is wave motion. Telephone signals ride solitons in fiber-optic cables, enabling them to move unchanged across vast distances. Solitons have been found in the electrical activity of cardiac tissue and in the electromagnetism that affects the ionized gases, or plasma, that make up most of the visible universe.
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