Built on Facts

Swans on Tea has a short but very fascinating post about paper. Turns out the little milimeter thick gram-mass bits op finely smashed tree pulp our civilization relies on shares a lot in common with mile thick billion-billion-kilogram-mass tectonic plates. Here’s a selection from the preprint’s conclusion:

Looking in more detail at the correlations of the activity, differences transpire however. The experimental AE events show subtle correlations via the autocorrelation function, via the waiting times before events, and via the Omori’s law. All these measure different aspects of the avalanche activity, and in all the cases the model differs in its behavior. Here, we lack completely theoretical understanding, in particular as regards such a quantitative measure as the Omori exponent. It is interesting to note that geophysics -oriented analysis methods produce results in agreement with observations from tectonic activity. Here again the steady state character of the experiment at hand is of utility.

Notice that like all good science, the things being examined are not nearly completely understood yet. That’s why we study them. Discovery is a thrill, and pushing back the boundaries of knowledge reveals hidden things which were not heretofore suspected about the world - including relationships between paper and earthquakes.

One of the strange and beautiful things about physics is its economy of concept. Principles which seem specific to a particular situation often appear in another guise in an entirely different context. Like fractals, the laws of nature reveal themselves to be a manifestation of ever deeper and more unified mathematics. July 1 I’ll be discussing this in the context of hurricanes and galaxies, but you’ll think of many other examples if you’re interested. At random: the planet earth and a water drop are completely different in composition, structure, and dominant internal forces - but both are spherical, and for essentially the same underlying mathematical reason. Keep an eye out for these mysteries, and you may be awed at what all there is hidden away in nature for the curious to discover.