What do the nifty cherry-red daub of Jupiter and the impulses running along your nerves have in coarse ? They ’re both guess to be examples of solitons — or solitary wave that comport much like particles .

Like so many important scientific concepts , solitary wave were bring out in a totally random happenstance — in this case , by a Scotch applied scientist on a Equus caballus .

Top image : NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center .

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We be given to retrieve of waves as come one after another , like the roll waves at the ocean shoring or the many waves that rip through a corduroy when it ’s strum . This is n’t always the sheath . Sometimes , just one huge curve can go through a medium , all by itself .

Many people have seen this happen , but it was n’t until the early 1800s that someone bother to document it . John Scott Russell was go along a distribution channel of water when he witness ‘ a rounded , smooth , and well - defined heap of water ’ direct down the channel beside him . For most of us , that would have been the end of the story , but Russell had a horse and the will to use it , and so he gave chase to the single heap of water , espouse it down the channel to see how far it would go . He claimed that he ‘ overtook it still roll on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an minute . ’ Some of us would have lose our heads and tried to lasso the thing , but Russell keep going , notice how it tardily diminished before the channel started winding and he lost the water ball .

Back Russel move to his home to study his crafty new opposition . He build a wave tank that he used to study the property of soliton , using the slightly less skill fictional name , ‘ wave of transformation . ’ Solitons , he learn , move at different speeds reckon on their size . If two soliton of dissimilar size meet , they have the moving ridge belongings of being capable to occur through each other and keep become in opposite directions .

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Solitons can be flyspeck , like the impulses sent out by cheek , or giant , like the space soliton wave that was show to have moved through the Earth ’s ionosphere in 2008 .

But the Great Red Spot of Jupiter is thought to be the most prominent solitary wave of all . soliton wave have been shown to move through blood plasma , and the idea is that a single undulation , in a rotating atmosphere , can be spin into a whirl . Although the core of the soliton , and the Spot , is a vast red whirl , it moves through the atmosphere of Jupiter the way a soliton does .

If this is genuine , then the Spot originated not as a temperature differential coefficient or a storm , but as a solitary wave wave produced by the rotation of the planet itself . More data is needed before scientists can be sure , and unfortunately no one can visualize the problem out by simply tail after the position on a horse , but perhaps someday we ’ll know if we ’re really seeing a soliton when we look up at Jupiter .

Ideapad3i

look-alike : NASA

ViaThe Physics Book , Analogies in Physics and Life , andHarvard .

AstronomyHistoryJupiterPhysicsScience

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