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I asked my wife's sister's husband, the other day, what you'd
have to change to get waves on the beach that were just like
the usual waves, but only arrived like say once an hour or once
a week or something.
Could you do it by twiddling gravity or something?
We talked about viscosity and surface tension and things; surface tension is apparently something (some sort of epiphenomenon, maybe) having to do with the statistical mechanics of liquids; some correlate of the pressure inside a bubble of water floating in a gravityless environment. What are waves like in oil? In honey? Eeeeewww! What about those little transparent plastic boxes with two different colored liquids in them, that make cool slow waves when you turn them over? But the air-water interface isn't all that important in beach waves, we didn't think. We didn't really figure out the answer, so I went back down to the water to watch the kids playing and to work on my drip-castle. I just thought it'd be neat to have waves that only came in like once a decade. |
