The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: the *science* version

My last G+ post reported this:

Something out there kills about one oceangoing ship a week.

It is probably freakishly large waves – well outside the ranges predicted by simple modeling of fluid dynamics and used to set required force-tolerance levels in ship design. Turns out these can be produced by nonlinear interactions in which one crest in a wave train steals energy from its neighbors.

Much more in the video.

So go watch the video – this BBC documentary from 2002 on Rogue Waves. It’s worth your time, and you’ll learn some interesting physics.

As I’m watching, I’m thinking that the really interesting word they’re not using is “soliton”. And then, doing some followup, I learn two things: the solutions to the nonlinear Schrödinger equation that describe rogue waves are labeled “Peregrine solitons”, despite not actually having the non-dissipative property of your classical soliton; and it is now believed that the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald was probably wrecked by a rogue wave back in ’75.

In a weird way this made it kind of personal for me. I used to joke, back when people knew who he was, that Gordon Lightfoot and I have exactly the same four-note singing range. It is a fact that anything he wrote I can cover effectively; I’ve sung and played The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald many times.

So, I’m texting my friend Phil Salkie (he who taught me to solder, and my reference for the Tinker archetype of hacker) about this, and we started filking. And here’s what eventually came out: Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the science! version:

The lads in the crew saw that soliton come through

It stove in the hatches and coamings

Her hull broached and tore, she was spillin’ out ore

That rogue put an end to her roamings.

Does anyone know where the Gaussian goes

When the sea heights go all superlinear?

A Schrödinger wave for a watery grave

It’ll drown both the saint and the sinner.

That is all.