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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善數, 不用籌策 (shàn shù, bù yòng chóu cè)
He who is good at counting, uses no counting tools
“A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is”
道德經, 二十七 (dào dé jīng, 27)

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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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.

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善數, 不用籌策 (shàn shù, bù yòng chóu cè)
He who is good at counting, uses no counting tools
“A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is”
道德經, 二十七 (dào dé jīng, 27)

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.

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善數, 不用籌策 (shàn shù, bù yòng chóu cè)
He who is good at counting, uses no counting tools
“A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is”
道德經, 二十七 (dào dé jīng, 27)

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.

The Binary Pulsar PSR 1913+16 is a good example of the limitations of the accuracy of a broad class of periods ('cycles'?).

In Newtonian gravity, a binary is perfectly stable, and so its period would be too (provided, of course, that the two objects are point masses, that the only interaction is gravitational, etc, etc, etc).

A binary pulsar would, at first glance, come about as close to being perfect, in a Newtonian sense - the objects are extremely rigid, extremely massive, and extremely small - little chance of any significant orbit changes!

Yet, the orbit is decaying; the period is not stable, and the change in the orbit can be measured quite easily - that's what got Hulse and Taylor their Nobel Prize.

In GR, this is just what is expected - the system is losing energy due to the gravitational (wave) radiation, and will one day result in something like a GRB.

And the signature of just such an inspiral is one of the things LIGO is looking for.

What, then, does 'cycles' give you that you don't already get with GR?

Nereid, the cycle of a binary is the best way to look at it if you want to test GR. If you did a non-cyclic analysis it would be awfully obtuse.

Here is an example that I was just looking at at this site on solar flares. It is obvious to me that there is a ~160 minute cycle in the flare data. So I copied the image and stuck in a regular 160 minute cycle next to it and it is quite accurately 160 minutes. Then I did a search for 160 minute solar cycle x-ray flares and found:

Periodicities Near 160 Minutes in Flare Occurrence
(also at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003SoPh..215..327B)

So possible connections are noted and might suggest mechanisms, but if a period is significantly different then further questions are obviously needed to be answered.

I add to this my observation that an object in orbit just above the Surface of the Sun will go around in a little over 160 minutes. Therefore there will exist a point below the solar surface where gravitational forces will relate to the actual 160 minute period. This fact seems to have escaped all people studying these phenomena.

Another thing I accidentally found when looking for this material was this page on 160 minute cycles that also mentions:
Note that 69.5 uHz is 240 minutes. This "discrete spectrum within the 5 min global oscillations of the Sun" is probably equivalent to my term "beats of the 5 minute oscillations" and that period is close to one that I found, but there are others also.

A nice book on this subject is "Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time" by Stephen Jay Gould.

He discusses the contrast between cyclic concepts of time based on repetitive phenomena (seasons etc) and directional concepts of time (such as progress).

In reality most phenomena have an element of both making cycles into spirals in nature, all are winding down in this universe.

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Right-- but note that most spirals are gradual enough (binary pulsars included) to be considered a cycle on the timescale of the period, and to be considered a progression on much longer timescales (related to the "Q" concept). This is a huge simplification that makes physics much easier to conceptualize.

Yes, I agree that there must always be a gradual change as well as the cycle itself. If you think about conservation laws, then if we know that a cycle exists then it must be leaking energy. The Q of a cycle tells us the rate of decay. For binary stars it is pretty slow, but still measurable.

Actually this gradual change of a cycle is epitomized in the work of the Professor of Geology at Moscow University, S Afanasiev. We know that the moon is gradually receding from the earth (present rate 1 part in 10^10 per year, or a tiny bit faster than the Hubble rate). This causes a gradual increase in the length of the month, and also the earth's rotation rate. It causes a different rate of change in the precession of the lunar nodes which is currently a cycle of 18.6 years.

This 18.6 year cycle shows also as a 9.3 year cycle in climate variables (because there are two nodes) and in Russia they have huge salt mines that show this cycle over vast lengths of time. This allows the lunar nodal cycle to be measured very accurately and with these large deposits they can be dated by counting the years. This is like tree rings or the arctic and antarctic ice bore cycles but in salt deposits. Afanasiev found that not only is the lunar cycle found but also the interaction of it with the seasons. So at present the 9.3 year cycle comes back into line with the seasons every 3+1/3 cycles (being 1/0.3) which is every 31 years (also can be calculated as 9.3/.3=31). This period is found in climate in some places. Going back in time to when the 18.6 year cycle was 18.5 years, the 1/2 cycle would be 9.25 years and the seasonal interaction would be 9.25/.25 = 37 years. So a tiny change causes a bigger change in the interaction effect. Prof Afanasiev has published a book in Russian called "Nanocycles Method" which describes all of this and it has a huge table of the cycles found and how long ago that happened. It goes back beyond 600 million years ago. He has done comparisons to radiocarbon dating and calibrated the whole scale and it allows accurate dating of many geological deposits.

I see many places where astronomical and geological cycles are interlinked.

I still do not see what this thread is about.

Okay we see cycles, so what?

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善數, 不用籌策 (shàn shù, bù yòng chóu cè)
He who is good at counting, uses no counting tools
“A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is”
道德經, 二十七 (dào dé jīng, 27)

I think some people collect them as a hobby. It's like collecting, say, Hummel figurines. (Is it merely a concidence that the MI Hummel home page shows an artwork entitled "Ring around the Rosie" -- a classic cyclic child's game?)

You or I may not care, but it is a whole way of life for the collector and they are yearning to show off their collection and get others involved in something they think is fascinating.

The disinterested... yawn.

Nice figurines.

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You can say "so what?" to anything. But if you read the posts you can see the benefit of cycles for studying many fields scientifically.

Is that an attempt to introduce Against The Mainstream discussion?

I am ignoring such things.

I have given plenty of cases where cycles knowledge has assisted mainstream efforts and which have nothing particularly to do with GR. I have nothing against GR, but the proportion of things that we observe that are explained by it are quite small. It says nothing about all the observed cycles in geology or paleontology which are related to astronomy. It says next to nothing about the various solar oscillation modes and why they come about. Plain old electromagnetism has more to do with many cycles observed than GR does - e.g. Schumann resonance, solar 11 and 22 year cycles. But the fact remains that anything like complete understanding of solar processes does not exist. Therefore every tool that is available assists in getting a fuller picture.

About 50 years ago a number of different cycles researchers such as Alexander Chizhevsky and Edward R Dewey had reached the understanding that many conditions on Earth showed cycles that were common to the solar system and even beyond. They were generally dismissed by scientists as wrong. Now the next generations of these scientists are finding that in fact the Earth's weather is affected by space weather. Why is it that so many people have such rigidly closed minds? The fact that you haven't heard of something before is not, of itself, an argument for rejecting it. It is an argument for learning something new and encouraging better education in the future. The only reason that people like Chizhevsky and Dewey are ignored is that they were interdisciplinary researchers and the education system, in its state of rigidity, hasn't worked out how to address such matters.

Back when computing power was scarce indeed, data analysis tools such as FFTs were either dreams or incredibly expensive.

Today even a bargain basement PC, with the right software, can do powerful transforms on even large datasets, in mere seconds.

To what extent are 'cycles' just a (frequency domain) subset of the sorts of results you can get using these kinds of (modern) tools?

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In post #3, I asked about dimensions other than time and (3D, ordinary) space (I'm still curious to know whether crystallography counts as 'cycles research').

Answering my own question, and asking another, to what extent are there 'cycles' in the CMB (angular power spectrum)?

Could 'cycles' be said to be in velocity (phase) space too, such as in a search for local dark matter, based on the collisionless Bolzmann equation?

FFT is a useful tool. There are many ways to find cycles and additional things that can be done afterwards. I will summarize briefly:

1. FFT is very good when a cycle has a fixed period and phase throughout the data as it will identify a single peak. When there are some regular variations in the data and the sample is big enough, then it is still very useful. An example of this would be tide analysis. Tides cannot be computed from basic principles. Tides are all calculated using analysis of the data for periods which are identified as combinations of relevant frequencies including sun-earth-moon and motion, nodes, inclination, precession, anomaly etc. with a huge list of periods present.

2. MESA is maximum entropy spectral analysis and will sort out a bunch of cycles from background noise based on information theory. It has a big advantage over FFT in that with a smaller sample it will get the period far more accurate as it does not have to be an exact fraction of the sample length.

3. Dewey used moving averages because it was a lot easier to do by hand than FFT. Techniques like this are still used to extract a single cycle from data because the difference between two moving averages is pretty nearly equivalent to a fancy digital tool that selects a range of frequencies. For example using say a 1-year centred average less a 3-year centred average will extract a 3 year cycle from data that has a lot of low frequency movements also present - e.g. a stock market.

4. The average shape of a wave over a chosen cycle period. Here the start of each cycle is synchronized either by regular cycles or some other criterion and the average cycle shape determined. This can be used for things like heart beats, musical instrument sounds, etc. It can also be used for discrete data like redshift measurements and then a histogram is made rather than a graph.

But establishing the presence of periods is only a part of what can be done, although an essential part it isn't the most interesting. You can look at the degree to which periods are consistent, whether they are modulated, and the modulating periods in turn. I know of economic data with several degrees of modulation. You can look at the phase also. Dewey showed that the phase of a 17.723 (I think) year cycle present in thousands of years of Nile floods was consistent over different parts of the sample, showing that it had very high consistency of period and phase. There must be a cause for that. It is not likely to be found in simple fluctuations on earth, but perhaps in lunar motion affecting atmospheric pressure causing rainfall changes. This is where the detective work comes in, and can lead to new understanding of how our climate works. If you miss this sort of possibility (which is often interdisciplinary) then you miss the chance to make a new discovery.

Dewey also found that certain cycles periods were commonly reported, such as the 9.6 year cycle in many animal populations. When he got all these data from different disciplines together he found that the phase of any one set with a common cycle period was generally also common. That is evidence of a common causation. Further he found that these common periods were often related by simple ratios. The same thing is still being found in astronomy today such as in the 155 day and related periods in the Sun.

I highly recommend the article in which Dewey summarized all these findings (he just gives a single case of each thing as an example, although he has many more examples). The Case for Cycles by Edward R Dewey. It is worth mentioning that there were several interdisciplinary conferences on cycles including the 1931 Matamek Conference. Dewey was not at that but when he found out about it he contacted the people involved and within a very short time the Foundation for the Study of Cycles was born.
Traditionally not. Most cycles researchers only look at temporal patterns. However I am of the opinion that in a universe with so many wave related phenomena it is wise to look at both spatial and temporal repetitions because they are obviously inter-related. I have personally done a lot of analysis of crystal bond lengths and related matters. I am happy to report the analysis without interpretation as long as this is not going to be considered ATM (it isn't, but if you look at the results you are bound to have ATM thoughts!)
Well if they are waves that wrap around the sky a whole number of times it is reasonable to look at them as cycles.
I have not heard of this before, and the first page I searched on was unintelligible to me. Can you explain please?

I certainly do analysis in other than straight temporal or spatial data sets. Velocities and even frequencies can be looked at as being repetitive. Of course a cycle in frequency simply means a bunch of harmonics. Here is an example of a simple FFT analysis I did a day or two ago. No doubt if you did an FFT on this FFT data you would find a frequency of 80 minutes as related to all the peaks present: