Rogue Waves
As long as men have been sailing the open ocean, there have been tales of immense waves, waves much larger than the surrounding sea-state, looming up and devastating and even sinking large, ocean going vessels. Eye-witness accounts of these waves put them at 75-100 feet high, but for years, scientists dismissed these accounts as an extreme example of the sorts of exaggerations that fishermen are known to tell.
You see according to all scientific knowledge of waves, one of these giants, or “rogue waves” as they are known, could only happen once every 10,000 years in all the world’s oceans, making the sighting of one a statistical improbability. But despite this “statistical improbability”, eye-witness accounts continued, and large, ocean going vessels continued to be lost without a trace at a rate of about one a week. (These disappearances were blamed on poor maintenance, operator error, etc.)
Now as it turns out, there was one wave scientist, Al Osborne, who started with the premise that these eye-witness accounts and ship disappearances were actually happening, and began searching for a scientific explanation. Employing quantum mechanics, Osborne developed a wave model that, if valid, showed that these rogue waves might be far more common than the the once ever 10,000 years predicted by the standard model.
Osborne’s theory was dismissed.
Then on New Year’s Day, 1985, a monster that behaved exactly as predict by the Osborne model swept over an oil platform in the North Sea. More recently, advanced radar imaging of the oceans has shown that the “non-linear monsters” are quite common, roaming the oceans, where they all too often leave no witnesses to their devastation.
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My scholastic background is in science. Underpinning my BFA is a bachelor of science degree, with an emphasis on math and physics. I believe the development of the scientific method is one of the great steps forward in the history of the human race.
The scientific method begins with observation, so that in mind I’d like to offer the following observations:
In the wake of a devastating natural disaster that garners international media attention, a blogger claiming to command a $400/hour rate for internet consulting offers to donate the proceeds from a day of his services to relief efforts. Nothing further on this is ever heard.
This same blogger, still claiming to command $400/hour as an internet consultant, implores his blog readership to join in a fund-raiser to buy a handful of playstation memory sticks to provide portable pornography to US troops stationed in Islamic countries. Price of the memory sticks? About $100 each a J&R Music. Again, after the initial post, nothing more about this is ever heard.
This same blogger, while claiming to advise the highest levels of corporate America on internet strategy can offer as any evidence of his acumen only a string failed blog ventures and penny-anti domain name auctions.
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Human beings have the strange ability to ignore what is plainly observable when these observations conflict with how they think the world should be, or how they think the world ought to be. For years scientists managed to blind themselves to the huge body of evidence–indeed, the plain fact–of rogue waves because these waves didn’t fit into their own prejudices. These prejudices can be so blinding they can cause even the most acute minds to ignore or dismiss what is plainly in front of their faces.
