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2023 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

In Search of a Destination

Author : Emil Stanev

Published in: Trajectories in Oceanography

Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

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Abstract

In this chapter, I describe my path to science, starting from my first encounters with physics. Reflections on the Earth sciences, meteorology, physical oceanography, and geophysics are given by way of comparison between Earth sciences and physics. A significant part of this chapter is devoted to fluid mechanics and numerical modeling.

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next chapter Further into the Ocean
Footnotes
1
The first years of my life and the story of my family are described in my book “Sea of People and Numbers” (Stanev 2022).
 
2
The pioneer organization in Bulgaria during the communist regime, in addition to political activities among children, was also engaged in different activities in various scientific and technical fields. In the period 1951–1990, the Sofia Theological Seminary was transformed into the “Pioneer Palace”.
 
3
In the universities of communist countries, it was compulsory to study ideological disciplines.
 
4
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a Danish philosopher, essayist, and religious writer. He is often regarded as a pioneer of existential philosophy.
 
5
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German classical philologist and philosopher.
 
6
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905–1980) was a French novelist, playwright, philosopher, critic of religion, and publicist. He is considered a mastermind and chief exponent of existentialism and a paragon of twentieth-century French intellectuals. For his complete works, the Nobel Committee awarded him in 1964 the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he refused to accept. For this action, he cited his principle of not accepting official honors, since “a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution”.
 
7
The calculus controversy is perhaps the biggest “priority dispute” in science over who had first invented calculus with major players Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz had published his work first in 1684 (he began working on his variant of calculus in 1674), but Newton had begun working on a “geometric” form of calculus (the method of fluxions and fluents) in 1666. Today, the consensus is that G. W. Leibniz and I. Newton independently invented and described the calculus. More frequently used notations follow the Leibnitz formalism.
 
8
Citation is from Hawking and Mlodinow (2005).
 
9
Steven Weinberg says the following about science: “With all its imperfections, modern science is a technique that is sufficiently well tuned to nature, so that it works – it is a practice that allows us to learn reliable things about the world. In this sense, it is a technique that was waiting for people to discover it” (Weinberg 2015).
 
10
The reason Einstein considered general relativity must be right is that it was too beautiful a theory to be wrong. When it came to the question what if observations had not agreed with the theory, Einstein said: “I would have been sorry for the dear Lord, for the theory is correct”.
 
11
A possible explanation of the esthetic issue is formulated by Steven Weinberg: “…But we seek beauty in our theories, and use aesthetic judgments as a guide in our research. Some of us think that this works because we have been trained by centuries of success and failure in physics research to anticipate certain aspects of the law in nature, and through this experience we have come to feel that these features of the nature’s laws are beautiful” (Weinberg 2015).
 
12
Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) claims: “In this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation”. To this he adds: “What gave me the main impetus was the endeavour to understand the phenomena of physical things in their general context, nature as a whole moved and animated by inner forces”. With that, he can be considered as a forerunner to the James Lovelock's idea of the Earth as a living organism (the Gaia-Hypothesis).
 
13
In March 1794, Goete visited the two brothers Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt in Jena. Their friend Friedrich Schiller also joined. The meeting of these four intellectual giants gave rise to the “Little Academy”, a lively exchange of ideas, especially on scientific issues. Alexander von Humboldt, the younger of the two brothers, an explorer, and scientist, was claiming that nature had to be experienced through a feeling. The British romantic poet Robert Southey claimed that A. von Humboldt was “among travelers what Wordsworth is among poets” (Wulf 2015). Charles Darwin (1809–1882) talks about Humboldt’s writing as a “rare union of poetry with science”.
 
14
Aesop (probably lived in the sixth century B.C.) was an ancient Greek poet of fables and parables.
 
15
Bulgarian revolutionary and leader in the liberation struggles of the Macedonian Bulgarians.
 
16
Claudius Ptolemy (approximately from 80 to 160 of our era), a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who lived in or around the city of Alexandria, in the Roman province of Egypt, wrote in the second century AD the Almagest. This is one of the most influential scientific texts in history, which canonized a geocentric model of the universe.
 
18
The research of L. Krastanov focused on the phase transitions of water in the atmosphere and cloud formation processes. Together with Ivan Stransky, one of the most famous Bulgarian scientists, he proposed a theory about the mechanism of crystal growth at a crystal surface or interface (Stranski and Krastanow 1938). On December 4, 2022, their paper has been cited 967 times in international journals (not counting citations to Stranski-Krastanov’s growth model without citing the original article), which is a very good achievement for Bulgarian scientists.
 
19
Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby (1898–1957) was a Swedish meteorologist who contributed significantly to the description of large-scale motions of the atmosphere using fluid dynamics. He was the first to describe the concept of potential vorticity (see Sect. 2 in chapter “Further into the Ocean”) and also made contributions to oceanography.
 
20
A cyclone is a system of winds that rotates in an anticlockwise direction around a center of low atmospheric pressure. In anticyclones, winds rotate in a clockwise direction around a center of high atmospheric pressure. Cyclones are generally associated with cloudy and rainy weather. Anticyclones are predictors of nice weather.
 
21
The French mathematician and mechanical engineer Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis (1792–1843) introduced the Coriolis force in 1835.
 
22
The ionosphere is that part of the atmosphere which contains large quantities of ions and free electrons. It makes up the bulk of the high atmosphere. Ionization of the gas molecules is due to the solar radiation.
 
23
The troposphere (from ancient Greek τροπή tropé “turn, change” and σφαίρα sphaira “sphere”) is the lowest layer of the Earth's atmosphere. The troposphere extends from the ground to the beginning of the stratosphere. Its thickness ranges from ~ 8 km at the poles to ~ 18 km at the equator. The troposphere contains about 90% of all the air in the Earth's atmosphere. The stratosphere is a layer of the Earth's atmosphere that lies between ~ 10 and 50 km above the Earth. It is characterized by an increase in temperature with increasing height.
 
24
At that time, it was called diploma work in Bulgaria.
 
25
Jacques Laskar showed that the motion of the planets in the Solar System is chaotic, which prohibits any accurate prediction of their trajectories beyond a few tens of millions of years (Laskar 2012, arXiv:​1209.​5996).
 
28
The famous equation F = m.a does not appear in the fundamental work by I. Newton “Principia” (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), where one finds few equations (Smith 2008).
 
29
Claude Louis Marie Henri Navier (1785–1836) was a French mathematician and physicist.
 
30
Sir George Gabriel Stokes (1819–1903) was an Irish-British mathematician and physicist.
 
31
Fox-Kemper (2018) presented a comprehensive review of almost all important aspects of the motion and typical types of variability at different scales of the ocean, as well as the unresolved processes and their parameterizations. Reading this review requires a thorough knowledge of mathematics and physics.
 
32
The reviews of Griffies et al. (2010) and Fox-Kemper et al. (2019) describe the present-day situation with ocean modeling, as well as the challenges and prospects for ocean circulation models.
 
33
In dynamics of viscous fluids, it is assumed that velocity at the bottom is zero.
 
34
By coupled atmosphere–ocean models, we would most commonly be referring to a numerical model of the atmosphere, usually with an associated land-surface model, which is “two-way coupled” (at least daily, if not more frequently, e.g., hourly) to a numerical model of the ocean, often with an associated sea-ice model (Harris 2018).
 
35
A review on the historical development of concepts and practices of weather and ocean predictions has recently been provided by Pinardi et al. (2017).
 
36
Eugene Paul Wigner (1902–1995) was a Hungarian-American physicist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 “for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles”. In his famous article “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”, he writes: “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning” (Wigner 1960).
 
37
In fluid dynamics, the baroclinicity of a stratified fluid is a measure of deviation of the gradient of pressure from the gradient of density. A simpler case is the barotropic flow, for which density surfaces coincide with the pressure ones.
 
38
Bottom Boundary Layer.
 
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Metadata
Title
In Search of a Destination
Author
Emil Stanev
Copyright Year
2023
Book
Trajectories in Oceanography

Print ISBN: 978-3-031-33719-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-33720-8

Copyright Year: 2023

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33720-8_1