I have spent a lot of time studying cycles. There are cycles in everything. Of course many of the cycles in our lives and on Earth are caused by astronomical cycles. Here are a few:
* Daily cycle - Earth spinning relative to Sun
* Weekly cycle - maybe moons phases of solar N-S reversals at Earth
* Monthly cycle - Moon (but also Sun's rotation)
* Yearly cycle - Earth traveling around Sun relative to axial tilt
* Precession of equinoxes 25,700 years
* Milankovitch cycles - 23,000, 41,000, 97,000 and 405,000 years cause Ice ages.
* Bobbing through the galactic plane ~31,000,000 years
* Getting nearer and further from galactic core ~170,000,000 years
* Going around the galaxy ~230,000,000 years

All of our senses are based on cycles also, but much faster ones. One famous physicist said that it seems that at a basic level physics reduces to three equivalent measures: mass, energy and frequency and that perhaps the most fundamental of these is frequency. (Note due to E=hf and E=mc^2).

There are cycles in everything that has been studied in detail. URL removed by moderator

I welcome any discussion on cycles or questions relating to it.

The Chandler wobble has about a 14 month period

These are all examples of (semi-) periodic phenomena, in the time dimension.

There are also many examples of such phenomena in other dimensions.

For example, crystallography is the study of one class of such, in solids; the dimension in this case is space (length x length x length).

Any other examples, with different dimensions?

I think this is already discussed in ATM a lot.


What do you want to say here? Who was the famous physicist, and why would frequency be the most fundamental? Does frequency help me get a pound of cheese? (apart from a lot of cheese being round, which could be interpreted as a cycle).

Our senses are based on cycles, well, I guess sight (light, being waves with a frequency) and hearing (sound, being waves with a frequency) can be considered that, but touch, smell, taste? Sure, you can come up with some explanation about how the senses work and how they send impulses to the brain, and these can have a freq.. etc. etc. A bit far fetched I think.

Sure, rotation is one of, if not the, greatest powers in the universe (sorry EU proponents), and sure we will find cycles in a lot of stuff. But is this thread not intended to give a more "mainstream like view" to your ATM-stances on how the universe works (i.e. everything is standing waves, and even if the values don't fit (like in your picture of the standing waves for the planets) I still hold on to it, I'll just plot it on a log-scale and the differences suddenly show up much much smaller in the picture).

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Optimism does not change the laws of physics. (T'Pol)
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. (Dao De Jing 27)
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Martin ( http://www.geocities.com/DrMartinV )

Hi rtomes,

I don't mind a thread about cycles in the general science section, but if you introduce discussion on an ATM topic here, you will be banned for life.

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Forming opinions as we speak

I think it was Stephen Weinberg. Because frequency is easier to understand needing only time. The others both need time plus other dimensions to understand.
Yes. You have the mass, so use E=mc^2 to get the energy and then E=hf to get the frequency. It is very high!
No, there are scientific papers that show the fundamental basis of smell is the little hairy bits in your nose vibrating according to the molecular frequency.
Hey, I have had a heavy threat about ATM in this thread. Keep it to regular subjects.

Well the deBroglie wavelength, which you are pointing at here, really loses its meaning for macroscopic objects. It may be high for my cheese, but it has no meaning. I cannot go to the shop and tell them, please give me 5 THz of cheddar.

__________________
************************************************** *************************
Optimism does not change the laws of physics. (T'Pol)
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. (Dao De Jing 27)
************************************************** *************************
Martin ( http://www.geocities.com/DrMartinV )

Can you go in and ask for five pounds of cheese?

It could be argued that the concept of time itself, and by association space, as Nereid points out, is based on cycles. Time is measured by counting cycles, either directly or by counting distance in cycles, like the notches on a ruler. I think the importance of cycles must be related to what a cycle fundamentally is-- a return to the starting point, where everything is the same except one more cycle has been counted. There is no other way to break up reality into smaller "bites" without changing it fundamentally-- you want everything that matters to return to what it was, so that you have not changed anything but your count-- then you really have a microcosm of the whole. So the reliance of physics on cycles is deeply related to the reliance of physics on reductionism.

Well as I understand it, some nuclei have been sent through two slits and do interfere on the other side as expected by the frequency. Could be a problem with 2 kg blocks of cheese, because the slits will have to be very large to let the cheese through and very small to get the interference pattern.

Cycles are very natural to physics because SHOs (Simple Harmonic Oscillators) abound, and many fundamental physics equations are wave equations. Likewise in astronomy, so many things go around in orbits and rotate on their axes.

Some of the most fascinating stuff in recent decades has been Solar oscillations which are measured with such precision that the details of the Solar interior are studied just like the Earth's inside from Earthquakes.

Our counting time in cycles doesn't mean that that's what time really is. Some of time's "arrows", like the increase in entropy and possibly the expansion of space, are inherently progressive, never returning to a prior state.

Well, you cannot do quantum mechanics with macroscopic bodies, like a pound of cheese. Let's forget about that. It will get really messy, if you want to try that you will have to get the wave function for every particle in the cheese etc. etc. It cannot be done, cheese does not do interference.

Sure, cycles are everywhere in nature, I have stated above that rotation is most likely the most important "force" in the universe. (I know it is not a force, but anywho) and a lot of stuff can be done with SHOs sure. So, where do you want to go with this thread? The fact that cycles are there in nature, is that a cause or a result? If you look at planetary motions, and all the appropriate cycles that you wrote down in your list, are they not the result of gravity (or space time curvature if you don't go for gravity)?

About time (and I do not believe in time, but anywho) we have just chosen to put it into a cyclical framework and it does has its virtues (like being able to predict when the Nile will flood) but we might as well count continuously till infinity. Indeed, like Delvo wrote, there are some things like entropy that are always increasing, so why do we not use entropy, which can be measured, instead of time, which we have made up. But that is a whole other discussion; there is only the now.

So, I would say, cycles are results (years because of gravity, solar oscillations because of gravity and gas dynamics, etc.) and are not fundamental, although they can be useful.

__________________
************************************************** *************************
Optimism does not change the laws of physics. (T'Pol)
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. (Dao De Jing 27)
************************************************** *************************
Martin ( http://www.geocities.com/DrMartinV )

There are a couple of things that have nothing much to do with 'cycles', directly, but sometimes get mixed in.

Take a nice, pure crystal of atoms, at an appropriately low temperature.

Leave aside (for now) quantum uncertainty.

The atoms in the crystal are at fixed positions in space, and those positions are periodic.

Let's now excite the crystal, in a precise (but gentle!) way. The lattice will now vibrate - waves of a precise frequency will travel through the crystal, a frequency that can be derived from physical properties of crystal*.

Take an atom of cesium, of isotope 133. Do the right thing with it, and you have a time standard, one which depends upon a particular atomic transition ('doing the right thing' includes getting a handle on the quantum uncertainty).

And then there's the Sun, merrily oscillating away in thousands of p, f, and (we expect) g modes.

To use a single label ('cycles') for all these is, I think, very confusing.

For starters, it mixes up discrete (e.g. atomic spacings in a crystal, the ¹³³Cs atomic transition) and continuous phenomena.

It also, as tusenfem points out, obscures the explanatory power of the relevant physics - you get planetary orbital 'cycles' because (Newtonian) gravity is inverse square; you get solar oscillation 'cycles' because (ultimately) gravity is inverse square and the constituent particles the Sun's plasma is composed of collide (lots of details omitted); you get crystal 'cycles' because of the Pauli exclusion principle; you get the quartz crystal vibration 'cycles' (that your watch depends upon to tell you the time) from that same principle (ultimately); and so on.

To be sure, the various epiphenomena are hugely interesting and valuable, but once you have GR and QED (and, for nuclear transitions and particle physics, QCD and electroweak theory), all the various 'cycles' fall out when you turn the handle^.

So is the compiling of long lists of 'cycles' just a form of stamp collecting?

*There are caveats of course, and not only quantum uncertainty ones.
^Which may, and often is, hugely difficult to do; nonetheless, in principle ...

You are right that would be a problem, but there is already a more serious problem related to the false "Shroedinger Cat" paradox. Macro systems are not just superpositions of quantum systems-- they couple to their environments in fundamentally inextricable ways. Put differently, they contain noise! There is no way to handle the noise in quantum mechanics except to average over it, but that averaging destroys the coherence you need to get interference patterns. You can get macro systems to exhibit interference classically (like sound waves in cheese), but you couldn't get the whole cheese to exhibit interference even if you could pass it through a small enough slit, because there's too much noise on the scale of the kinds of frequencies you'd be talking about.
Good point-- cycles appear whenever you have a bound system. But note the oddity-- the only systems that yield complete periodicity are the simple harmonic oscillator potential (i.e., very strongly bound systems) or the gravitational/electric 1/r potential (emanating from a pointlike geometry). We do see those potentials a lot-- but other potentials do not give strictly periodic results, and even those two only do so for a certain amount of time before real life impinges.

So this thread has demonstrated that we do see cycles both from the perspective of what reality often does, and from the perspective of how we parcel reality into "bite sized" conceptual bits. There would seem to be a deep connection there-- interesting point to raise rtomes, though one must be cautious not to reason into fruitless directions from it, it lends itself to jingoism.

The reason that I raised SHOs is that ultimately cycles have causes that involve restorative forces. But what is one things result is another things cause. The procession of day and night is caused by the Earth's rotation (with a fine adjustment for the Earth's revolution) but is itself a cause for the development of biological cycles such as circadian rhythms. The value of cycles is that if you can record them for long enough then you can get accurate periods or frequencies. Then when you look at many different matters you can find the linkages from these different frequencies which are like fingerprints.

An example is the existence of tides. Today we all know that tides are attributable to the moon and sun and a few other factors of the moon and earth orbits. However when Kepler suggested that Tides were related to the Moon, the great Galileo denied it! The problem was he lived in the Mediterranian where the tides are diminished by the near closure of the straights of Gibraltar. I find it hard to believe that the tides being connected to the Moon was not known in the much more distant past by fisherman who would surely have noticed the lunar phases connection with the shifting of the time of tides.

So it is my contention that looking at cycles is a useful tool in learning to understand nature.

As I mentioned in my preceding post, the study of cycles can lead to discoveries that were not made in some other way.

There is the the question of resonance also which can cause seemingly unconnected things to move together. The discovery that pendulum clocks on a wall may get perfectly tuned was a wonderful moment in physics history. And yet resonance works regardless of the supposed law of physics involved. You can say that it is common to them all, but in a sense it is deeper than the various departments of physics.

Discoveries concerning how weather works including in recent times space weather have been assisted by the study of cycles. Cycles researchers knew the decades before astronomers did the measurement of solar irradiance variations measured by satellites that the "solar constant" was not constant. The presence of 11 year cycles and related variations in Earth weather systems meant that space weather was a worthwhile study. More recently, 11 year fluctuations in cosmic rays has meant that this is understood as a possible intermediary between solar variations and cloud formation on Earth.

It is not a question of either / or. Cycles is an extra tool that assists a scientist to make connections.

Someone found the 9.6 year cycle in the Canadian Lynx interesting. There are some dozen or more different species that have 9.6 year cycles of population, and many of them have no contact with each other. So there has to be a common cause. The only clue so far is a weak variation in ozone with the same period. This is still a largely unresolved situation. In the 1930s there were several conferences held by leading scientists from different fields (with many biologists) to look at these type of issues and eventually that lead to the formation of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles.

While having a bound is fruitful for the production of cycles, most real systems are not fully bound but have a degree of it which manifests as some Q factor in how well an oscillation is maintained. In QM a potential well is a basis for oscillations even though it is not fully closed. Things like the Earth and a person are clearly not closed systems, but they have some natural oscillations present all the same. Of course I should have had the Schumann resonance on my list of earth based cycles that affect us. It is responsible for the frequency of lightning flashes and might in some way play a part in influencing human brain activity as at 7.6 Hz it is in the middle of our main brain wave range.