I\u2019ve been away briefly this week, to an extremely cold and windy Suffolk coast.\u00a0 Not the kind of break one comes back from tanned – other than with wind-burn – or with skiing fractures, but remembering there is a world beyond academia seems important to me, to help me put the world in a bit of perspective.\u00a0 Nevertheless, it has to be said the weather was disgusting even by British seaside standards. Struggling against the wind, trying to make sure my deplorable woolly hat didn\u2019t disappear into the far distance (the wind was off the sea, a fierce easterly, so at least the hat wasn\u2019t going to get tossed into the sea), I was disappointed to find my mind still didn\u2019t turn off from physics.<\/p>\n
The sea was in a fury of white foam, layer upon layer of froth as the waves beat at the steep shingle bank we stood upon. The foam was also constantly blowing up and onto the beach and onto our clothes. Why was the foam so long-lived? Irritating to find myself trying to answer that question; I was NOT there to think about colloids! I do not believe the sea is now so jammed full of detergents (as sometimes one sees when a river gets frothy due to local pollution) that the foam is permanently stabilised by Fairy Liquid and its cousins. Whether the fury of the waves was sufficient, or whether there are saccharides or other molecules excreted by marine organisms contributing to a lowering of the surface tension, I don\u2019t know. And to be honest, when on holiday, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.<\/p>\n
Waves is the subject I\u2019ve been teaching to 400 eager (and not so eager) 1st<\/sup> years in Cambridge for the past few years; I\u2019ve also taught it previously (in more advanced form) to second years, and I have therefore had professional occasion to consider the nature of water waves, and seek out examples of how they behave.\u00a0 Shallow water waves and deep water waves have different dispersion relationships and hence behaviour, but I\u2019m quite sure neither representation would have been adequate to describe the turbulent water that seethed at my feet. \u00a0When I first started lecturing this material some years ago now, I came across the idea (and traditional images) of a tsunami, without having any idea of what such a thing was. I thought it was some obscure Japanese folklore. Of course, since 2004 (and again in 2011), no one could possibly have any illusions about the importance of this phenomenon, even though it still doesn\u2019t feature explicitly in my course.<\/p>\n There wasn\u2019t a proper sandy beach, no shells or crabs, I saw only the remains of cuttlefish (calcium-rich aragonite, if you\u2019re interested, and a useful and controllable buoyancy aid for the marine creature as long as it doesn\u2019t go too deep, where apparently the gas-filled chambers of the bone implode under the pressure). The shore mainly consisted of shingle and marram grass, but there was sand a-plenty, much of it being blown into my mouth or smothering the esplanade: Lewis Carroll\u2019s seven maids came to mind, although there was only a bulldozer which might have been attempting the same task. And where there was an accidental layer of sand covering, it had interesting ripples. Again my physicist\u2019s mind went into annoying overdrive: what determined the periodicity of the ripples? No doubt, as with any similar instability, there is an optimum\/fastest growing wavelength set by a balance of two factors, probably involving the distance the sandgrains have to migrate to build up the peaks and something to do with windspeed and how the peaks affect the local forces on the grains due to the wind. I reiterate, I was on holiday and I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THIS\u2026.I want to switch that part of my brain off. NB this means I\u2019m not looking for a detailed analysis of the problem in any response.<\/p>\n Of course, battling the power of the wind could hardly fail to remind me of the possibility of wind as an alternative energy source, and towering over Kessingland where we were staying were two large wind turbines rotating at speed. The figure I had just read in the book (Project Sunshine<\/a>) co-authored by my friend and long-term collaborator Tony Ryan <\/a>flashed into my mind. This book, an impressive, sweeping overview of our energy problems past, present and of course future, claims the outermost tips of the blades whizz round at 200mph. Do they? I refused to try to check that mental calculation out; I wanted to head for the pub. There weren\u2019t any offshore installations that I could see, despite what felt like a good opportunity to extract some energy from the ferocious wind, but I have been to this part of the coast when all is still and, as both Tony\u2019s book and the earlier Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air<\/a>, by my Cavendish colleague David Mackay<\/a>, now CSA at the Department of Energy and Climate Change make plain, storing energy from wind turbines and other sustainable energy sources is a major, unsolved challenge.<\/p>\n I had come to this part of the Suffolk coast with two aims. The first I had failed at badly; I hadn\u2019t switched off from the day-job as well as I\u2019d hoped, as the anecdotes above will make plain. My other aim had been to come to make my peace with this particular part of the sea. Some years ago I\u2019d visited Southwold at a time of turbulence and upset in aspects of both my professional and personal life. Whereas, throughout my life, I have found watching agitated and tumbling water to be a powerful source of peace, grounding and wonder, on that occasion I had found it simply moved me to tears with no accrued benefit. It was almost as upsetting then to find that wave-watching no longer restored my spirits as to suffer from the underlying distress itself.<\/p>\n To return to the same part of the coast and feel, once more, the joy derived from the unceasing and unpredictable motion of inky, churned-up water, was the true benefit of the break. It was good too to remember just how far I have been able to recover from what had seemed to be an encounter with an unassailable brick wall. If that recovery hadn\u2019t occurred I could never have started this blog; so this seems like a good moment to remind the reader of a truth I have discussed before<\/a>, that no one, however outwardly successful, is unlikely not to have been kicked in the teeth on more than one occasion. Equally they will have found some mechanism to use that to their advantage, to find a way round the immovable object blocking the way or at least to bury the bad memories so that they no longer impede daily life.<\/p>\n This same stretch of coast, a bit further up near Great Yarmouth, was home to that Dickensian family of Peggotty who lived in a boat on the shore \u2013 I was reminded of this as we walked past over-wintering boats dragged high up on the shingle. As it happens, I\u2019m just reading Claire Tomalin\u2019<\/a>s biography of Charles Dickens<\/a>. It is not irrelevant to the previous paragraph that he suffered in his youth, notably from his period in a blacking factory, and yet, as she puts it<\/p>\n \u2018What is most remarkable is the strength of the image he had of himself ,his belief in his own capacities and potential, justified by everything that came after, but quite uncertain then.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Additionally, the vulnerability he felt in the factory found its way into many of the children he characterised in his novels and provided fertile experience for him. However, few of us are likely to have quite that degree of self-belief and robustness Tomalin attributes to Dickens, particularly as at the time under consideration he was around 13 years of age. Nevertheless, it is healthy to remember that today\u2019s catastrophe can (although it most certainly won\u2019t necessarily do so) blend seamlessly into much more happy circumstances, with the accompanying wisdom of experience and accrued toughness. A small nugget to try to hold onto if your world appears to be crashing down around your ears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve been away briefly this week, to an extremely cold and windy Suffolk coast.\u00a0 Not the kind of break one comes back from tanned – other than with wind-burn – or with skiing fractures, but remembering there is a world … Continue reading