My teaching at the Marine Station for the ‘Our Ocean Planet’ module finished early this morning and so on my way back through town I took a few minutes to stop for a coffee and to work through and write down some thoughts I have been having about the need for me to find more time for creative projects (aka research) at work. Amongst these projects is a piece of work I would like to do looking at the development of bedforms (sand ripples) in time-varying flows – these might be sand ripples formed by the wind or sand ripples on the seabed formed by currents, including reversing currents such as tides and, perhaps, waves (although the spatial scales are quite different and so the details of the sediment transport processes might be very different and require a different model). This is an area of work that I was into yonks* ago. I have a pretty clear idea of the approach I want to take, I just need to knuckle down and try things out.
Anyway, I was sitting there writing in my notebook about creative projects and ripples with my cup of coffee (Americano) in front of me on a small table. This table had a bit of a wobble and I guess I was moving my body in some manner that caused the table to rock gently from side-to-side. I only realised this because when I looked up and looked at my coffee I was confronted with a pattern of lines (like ripples) in the surface…
These lines were aligned with the direction that the table was rocking (i.e. the table was rocking left-right as I looked at it and the pattern in the coffee was aligned front-back). It was a lovely, and fortuitous, example of pattern formation in nature of exactly the kind that I was thinking about. To try to extend things further I turned the coffee cup through 90 degrees and then deliberately set about rocking the table. I was hoping to make a new set of lines appear but at 90 degrees to the previous ones. The experiment was only partially successful. I broke up the existing pattern and saw some signs of new lines appearing…
…but I think my deliberate rocking was more forceful than my accidental rocking and I didn’t quite have the patience to make things work really nicely. Apart from anything else the coffee was getting cold and so I started to drink it. I think in my second picture you can see signs of a new pattern of lines aligned with the cup handle this time, but they haven’t completely redistributed or replaced the previous pattern.
This post nicely demonstrates both the pleasure and peril of being an inquisitive, scientifically-minded person. On the one hand, there is a rich world to discover in every single thing you do. On the other hand, it becomes impossible to simply sit and enjoy a cup of coffee without asking questions about what is going on!
*yonks = many years in case you have not come across this term before
Tim O'Hare 