Reciprocal System Research Society

Hey, have you guys heard of Solitons?

From http://www.ma.hw.ac.uk/solitons/press.html...

In 1834, John Scott Russell was observing a boat being drawn along 'rapidly' by a pair of horses. When the boat suddenly stopped Scott Russell noticed that the bow wave continued forward "at great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a well-defined heap of water which continued its course along the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed". Intrigued, the young scientist followed the wave on horseback as it rolled on at about eight or nine miles an hour, but after a chase of one or two miles he lost it.

Scott Russell was convinced that he had observed an important phenomenon, and he built an experimental tank in his garden to continue his studies of what he dubbed the 'Wave of Translation'. Unfortunately the implications which so excited him (he described the day he made his original observations as the happiest of his life) were ill-understood and largely ignored by his contemporaries, and Scott Russell was remembered instead for his considerable successes in ship hull design, and for conducting the first experimental study of the 'Doppler shift' of sound frequency as a train passes.

The 'Wave of Translation' itself was regarded as a curiosity until the 1960s when scientists began to use modern digital computers to study non-linear wave propagation. Then an explosion of activity occurred when it was discovered that many phenomena in physics, electronics and biology can be described by the mathematical and physical theory of the 'soliton', as Scott Russell's wave is now known. This work has continued and currently includes modelling high temperature superconductors and energy transport in DNA, as well as in the development of new mathematical techniques and concepts underpinning further developments.

After a delay which would probably be unacceptable to present day funding bodies, and in a field he could never have dreamed of, Scott Russell's observations and research of 160 years ago have hit the big time in the present day fibre-optic communications industry. The qualities of the soliton wave which excited him (the fact that it does not break up, spread out or lose strength over distance) make it ideal for fibre-optic communications networks where billions of solitons per second carry information down fibre circuits for cable TV, telephone and computers ("The secrets of everlasting life", New Scientist 15 April 1995). It is fitting that a fibre-optic cable linking Edinburgh and Glasgow now runs beneath the very tow-path from which John Scott Russell made his initial observations, and along the aqueduct which now bears his name.

Now there is an interesting paper which approaches the fundamentals like planck's constant, alpha, and the electron/proton ratio, from the standpoint of soliton dynamics, http://www.quanics.com/hydrogen13.pdf

This post made me think....if Meyl, Whittaker, and others can find scalar (vice transverse) propagation modes in Maxwell...why doesn't seem genius find the soliton modes?

Quite interesting stuff on the soliton (solitary wave), particularly the part stating that, when moving through a medium, it acts like a particle rather than a wave (and thus does not lose energy, like a shock wave does).

I've recently been reading a lot of Steinmetz (circa 1911) concerning electrical transients, which appear to have many of the same characteristics of solitons, if one were to treat the flow of electrons in a conductor like the propagation of a wave down a channel.

I also suspect that a lot of Tesla's work concerned the same phenomenon--examine the spark gap setup Tesla used in many of his experiments, where the spark had to be "blown out" to achieve the effects--analogous to stopping a boat suddenly--and a solitary "electron wave" would then continue down the conductor channel.

RMohan wrote: This post made me think....if Meyl, Whittaker, and others can find scalar (vice transverse) propagation modes in Maxwell...why doesn't seem genius find the soliton modes?

They may have, but just did not recognize it as such, since the phenomenon has not had much study. I often think of what Larson must have went through when extrapolating his postulates for the Reciprocal System, and finding "natural consequences" that were outside the current knowledge base, such as discovering quasars back in the 1950s, knowing they must exist, but our astronomical science was not developed to the point where they were recognized yet.

Just goes to show that when doing research, keep your mind open and don't ignore things that seem to be inconsistent with current observation.