Fig 1, video of water running downhill, and quickly forming into discreet waves.
Saw this the other day. Water running downhill. The input of water at the top of the hill looked continuous, so why does the flow become so quickly quantized? By “quantized” I mean the waves. Look at how evenly spaced the waves are. How did those waves arise and become so evenly spaced? Is this even spacing the result of causes in the details of the road and viscosity of water, or is the breaking into stages itself a fundamental law?
If I could vary the volume of water and the slope of the hill, I bet I would see the distance between the waves change, and there would be a simple relationship between wavelength, slope, and current.
Quantum mechanics started with the idea that Nature is inherently quantized. More specifically, the transfer of energy is quantized. Another word for this is “discontinuous”. The transfer of energy is discontinuous. When something is gaining or losing energy, it must happen in jumps and starts, even fits.
Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for using this assumption, that the transfer of energy is quantized, to explain why no amount of red light shone on a piece of copper will cause an electric current, but a very small amount of ultraviolet light will easily produce an electric current. The discreet nature of energy transfer is not explained, it is assumed, and from thence various phenomena can be explained.
The photoelectric effect, and quantum mechanics in general is an explanation of what is going on with very small things. I say, that something went off track in the history of physics when the explanations in the textbooks stated this discreet nature was only true in the very small world. Open a text book and you will read that the progression of energy in our everyday, macro-world is continuous. Not so! Not so! I say.
Watching the water running down hill and very quickly becoming discontinuous, reminded me that discontinuity is the rule - everywhere. This rule is so prevalent that we can easily ignore it. When you accelerate your car, the drive train works through discrete gears. Solar systems are built of discrete numbers of planets instead of a smooth distribution of material. You and I experienced gestation, infancy, childhood, adulthood. We lived through these stages. The transition between stages was through jumps and fits. Then we found ourselves in a new stage, and we live in this stage, until everything shifts and we find ourselves in a new stage.
I work in one job for a while, then undergo the rocky transition to a different job with more responsibility and more salary. I do not work at a smoothly continuous shifting job from high school to retirement.
In the 1970’s the Stephen J Gould was a main driver in the Harvard conference to save Darwinian evolution, because the fossil record does not show smooth changes. Instead, all the data we have shows that ecosystems remain stable for long stretches of time, and then, very quickly, new groups of species erupt which have complex relationships. The new ecosystem then persists for many thousands of generations, until a new shift occurs, and a whole new system of inter-related species appears. This modified paradigm was called Punctuated Equilibrium. The question was left open of how the new forms could arise so quickly.
Look around, especially now in the Springtime for us Northern Hemisphere people. You will see a series of dramatic steps and stages in the plants and animals. How many stages do you see? Things will stabilize sometime in June - but will they? If you have a garden you will watch the enormous discontinuities as flowers erupt, then fruits are developed. If you have a keen eye you will see several, discreet stages as your plants work towards harvest.
The point of this essay is that the progression of energy is not continuous, and we all know it. The progression of energy is decidedly dis-continuous. The water flowing downhill did not become broken into steps because of micro-causes of asphalt roughness. The water broke into steps because that is the law. The step-wise progression of energy transfer is universal, primal. The step progression causes phenomena, it is not caused by phenomena.
Great observations Michael!
I think we should understand the waveform as a cross section of a helix—whether it’s observed in ocean waves, ripples, sand in a tide pool, dunes, clouds, photoelectric quanta, or sinusoidal graphs, and so on and so on.
Dear Michael,
Regarding quantum leaps in evolution, I would like to refer you to the work of Dr Chandra Wikramasinghe on Lamarkian gene transfer from interstellar arrivals. Short article: https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2011.165
A thoroughly enjoyable podcast:
https://www.brothersoftheserpent.com/2020/03/episode-141-dr-chandra-wickramasinghe.html?m=1