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MEGADISASTERS
MEGA
DISASTERS
The Science of Predicting the Next Catastrophe

FLORIN DIACU

Princeton University Press

Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2010 by Florin Diacu
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work
should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Diacu, Florin, 1959–

Megadisasters : the science of predicting the next catastrophe / Florin Diacu.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-13350-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Natural disasters—Forecasting. I. Title.
GB5014.D53 2010
904′.5—dc22
2009029193

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in ITC New Baskerville

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I dedicate this book to all those who
try to make this world a safer place
You can only predict things after they have happened.
—Eugène Ionesco, The Rhinoceros

Predicting the future is easy. It’s trying to figure out what’s

going on now that’s hard.
—Fritz R. S. Dressler

We have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of

laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set
by the uncertainty principle.
—Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Contents

Prologue: Glimpsing the Future xi

1. Walls of Water: Tsunamis 1

2. Land in Upheaval: Earthquakes 21

3. Chimneys of Hell: Volcanic Eruptions 42

4. Giant Whirlwinds: Hurricanes, Cyclones, and Typhoons 63

5. Mutant Seasons: Rapid Climate Change 86

6. Earth in Collision: Cosmic Impacts 109

7. Economic Breakdown: Financial Crashes 128

8. Tiny Killers: Pandemics 149

9. Models and Prediction: How Far Can We Go? 168

Acknowledgments 179

Notes 181

Selected Bibliography 189

Index 193
Prologue
Glimpsing the Future

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

—Niels Bohr

couple of years ago, a friend asked me whether I wanted to know

A my future. I was puzzled. The itch of curiosity enticed me to say
yes, but the fear of bad news urged me to say no.
“I’d like to know only events I could affect.”
“You don’t believe in fate then?”
“Outside factors lead our lives, no doubt, but our actions
matter too.”
“Still, we never know what happens next.”
“Sometimes we can forecast things.”
“Yeah, right—like the weather in Victoria,” my friend laughed,
hinting at the fact that meteorologists often make inaccurate predic-
tions in our area.
Though it ended in disagreement, this discussion triggered an idea
in my mind. What events can we predict? When are forecasts possible
and how are they made? I thought of writing an informative and en-
tertaining book aimed at readers with little or no science training,
but who are willing to learn a few things about this topic.
My interest in prediction runs deeper. I am a mathematician. My
research field is the theory of differential equations, which provides
a language for the laws of nature. In particular, I work in celestial
mechanics—a branch of mathematics and astronomy that tries to
explain how stars, planets, and other cosmic objects wander in the
universe. The motion of these bodies can be established by solving
certain mathematics problems.
Celestial mechanics can predict the exact positions of all the plan-
ets thousands of years from now, forecast the day and time when
xii Prologue

eclipses take place, and detect invisible solar systems by studying the
motion of stars. So I knew that it is within our power to predict celes-
tial motions through careful reasoning and computations. But I also
had motives to agree with my friend’s concerns about predicting
other phenomena.
My concern was with a property called chaos, which occurs in many
dynamical systems. To mathematicians, chaos is another name for
high instability: similar starts don’t guarantee similar outcomes. Imagine,
for instance, a trip on the Amazon with two rafts that float freely down
the river. No matter how close to each other they start, the rafts drift,
and the distance between them increases in time.
Examples of mathematical chaos abound around us. Leaving for
work a few minutes later than usual can get people into the rush hour
traffic and significantly delay their arrival. Or, even though they share
the same genes and upbringing, twins may live very different lives. In
all these cases, no matter how close two evolving states begin, they
may diverge from each other.
Therefore chaos makes predictions difficult. It may act fast, as it
does with the weather, which cannot be forecast more than a few days
in advance, or it may set in slowly, as happens with planetary motion,
whose prediction becomes unreliable only millions of years later.
Studying all chaotic phenomena and finding out which of them
allow reliable forecasts would have been a gigantic task. Therefore I
wanted to focus on a few practical issues. So what should I opt for?
I decided to study phenomena that could affect the lives of many
people. From here the idea of researching megadisasters came
naturally, and it was fairly easy to select the ones I would include in
this book.
The television images of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami were still
fresh in my mind, so I knew that these killer waves would be on my
list of subjects. After all, the wave equation was part of a third-year
course I taught at the University of Victoria. I had to dig into the
history of the problem and find the connection between this differen-
tial equation and the work done on predicting tsunamis. In the com-
pany of pioneers of wave theory, like the mathematicians Lagrange
and Laplace and the physicists Rayleigh and Fermi, this subject prom-
ised to be exciting.
Glimpsing the Future xiii

Earthquakes formed an equally interesting topic. The undulation

of Earth’s crust is also described by a wave equation, which meant
that I was in my element again. Moreover I had lived through earth-
quakes and had read about the attempts to predict them—an issue
that is filled with controversy. Some scientists say forecasts can be
made; others think the opposite. But in 1975 a strong earthquake was
predicted in China about six hours before it happened. More than
150,000 lives were saved thanks to this warning. No doubt, something
intriguing was going on here, and I had to find out what.
The memory of a trip to Italy, where I visited Pompeii and later
climbed Mount Etna in Sicily, played a role in including volcanic
eruptions in my plans. But there were other reasons that influenced
this decision. One of them was the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Hel-
ens, south of Seattle. The explosion had been heard in Victoria,
which lies 300 kilometers north of the volcano. The timely forecast
of this event saved many lives. Another incentive for wanting to re-
search this subject was the famous Krakatoa eruption of 1883, which
ejected 25 cubic kilometers of ash and rock and produced a tsunami
that killed 36,000 people.
The 2005 hurricane Katrina convinced me that cyclones, ty-
phoons, and hurricanes should make my list too. From the mathe-
matical point of view, these phenomena are studied in the framework
of fluid mechanics, and I was well acquainted with the differential
equations describing them.
The issue of climate change was a clear choice from the beginning
not only because of the attention it receives today. Two colleagues of
mine at the University of Victoria had expressed very different views
on this topic. One was Andrew Weaver, an award-winning climatolo-
gist; the other, Jeff Foss, a philosopher. While Weaver, who runs his
climate models on powerful computers, considers global warming
imminent, Foss deems the dangers exaggerated. Since I know An-
drew and Jeff and respect them both, I decided that climate change
was an appealing subject to consider.
Cosmic impacts are related to my expertise, and I wanted to ap-
proach this issue too. Several books discuss the problem of predicting
such events, but they don’t always agree on what should be done if a
comet or an asteroid were to hit Earth. Therefore I had to understand
xiv Prologue

which solutions were more reasonable, and perhaps suggest new ways
of dealing with this problem. Moreover I realized that governments
don’t take the cosmic threat seriously. Consequently research done
in this field is underfunded.
An issue I felt compelled to include in my study was that of stock
market crashes. In 1929 a sharp drop in stock prices marked the be-
ginning of the biggest economic depression of all times and, com-
bined with a shaky geopolitical situation, led to the most devastating
war in human history. Hundreds of millions of people were affected
worldwide. Yale economist Robert Shiller showed that conditions sim-
ilar to those of the big depression occurred in 1999 and said that the
world’s economy was on the brink of a breakdown. A few days after
he published a book on this subject, the market fell sharply, but luck-
ily not low enough to produce a global catastrophe. Can we predict
the likelihood of such events and take measures to avert them? At the
time I was researching this issue, I didn’t know that a disaster was
threatening us. But as I went deeper into the problem, signs of poten-
tial trouble began to emerge.
As a mathematician with interest in the physical sciences, I wanted
to know more about pandemics. Their prediction has less to do with
medicine than with biology and mathematics. Indeed, mathematical
biology is a field that has recently made remarkable progress. I was
familiar with some of the technical models that help biologists in
their research and wanted to see how the collaboration between
mathematicians and epidemiologists could help prevent the spread
of influenza or some other deadly disease.
The struggle to comprehend the issues mentioned here paid off.
Now I know much more about predicting megadisasters than I knew
when I started this project. I also feel privileged to have had the back-
ing of two exceptional publishers. Princeton University Press took on
the task of conveying my ideas to the North American public and
Oxford University Press prepared the edition for the rest of the
English-speaking world. And I am glad that a top Japanese publisher
supported this project long before it was finished.
That’s how this book was born. Let us now follow its windings in
the quest for a safer planet.
MEGADISASTERS
1. WALLS OF WATER
Tsunamis

I got outside my hotel, and saw that the ocean was now
level with our island. To my horror, a wall of water—
boiling, frothing, angry as hell—was bearing straight
down at us, and a strange mist that looked like thick
fog blocked out the sun. I stopped breathing . . . .
—Dave Lowe, eyewitness to the 26 December 2004 tsunami
on the South Ari Atoll in the Maldives

e relate Christmas to happiness, but no holiday can shield us

W from grief. On the night of 25 December 2004, some breaking
news shook North America. A catastrophe had killed thousands of
people in Southeast Asia, many foreign tourists among the dead. The
number of reported victims was growing by the hour.
The rim of the Indian Ocean had been hit by a tsunami—also
known as a tidal wave—a tremendous shift of water that acts like a
deluge. Waves of such force are triggered by marine earthquakes,
landslides, and volcanic eruptions, or by large meteoritic impacts.
While in deep waters, tsunamis might pass undetected because of
their long and gentle shape. But once the seabed shallows, they swell
and invade the shore with a force that may flatten the ground.
I will never forget the images shown on television: the incoming
wave, the water rushing through the windows of a restaurant, the old
man swept away from the terrace of his hotel, the woman trying to
cling to the branch of a palm tree, the father and the child running
for their lives, the scream of the desperate mother, the indigenous
boy rescuing a blond girl from the flood . . . .
There were many stories, most of which I have forgotten—stories
of loss, grief, hope, or happy reunion. But one of them, which I heard
2 Chapter 1

months later, stayed with me. It was the tale of a survivor, a story told
with inner peace and resignation during a Larry King Live show on
CNN. This is what I learned from it.

The Model and the Photographer

Petra Nemcova and Simon Atlee spent their Christmas holiday in

Khao Lak, a lavish beach resort in southern Thailand. Petra was a
Czech supermodel, and Simon a British photographer. They had
fallen in love while he was shooting pictures of her for a fashion maga-
zine. But because they traveled on different assignments, they hadn’t
seen much of each other during the past few months.
This vacation had been Petra’s idea. She found Thailand amaz-
ing—a country with wonderful people, soothing climate, and breath-
taking landscapes. The trip was meant to be a surprise for Simon, so
she told him about it only shortly before their departure.
Christmas Day went by peacefully. They tanned on the beach and
talked about marriage and children. The wedding date was some-
thing they had still to set. After dinner they went to their room to
watch White Christmas, the 1950s’ musical comedy with Bing Crosby,
Danny Kay, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera Ellen. Petra had not seen
the movie before, and Simon thought she would like it.
The next morning they woke up early. Their stay at this orchid
resort had come to an end, and they wanted to get ready for depar-
ture. But first they had breakfast and took a walk along the beach.
On returning, Petra started packing. Simon went for a shower. Then
tragedy hit with almost no warning.
Through the balcony window Petra saw people running away from
the beach. They were screaming in panic as if a noisy marine monster
were following them.
“What’s happening?!” Simon shouted from the bathroom.
“I don’t know! An earthquake or something!”
Seconds later the glass window broke. In no time, the tsunami blew
up their bungalow and swept them away.
“Petra!! Petra!!” Simon cried.
“Catch the roof!” Petra called out before she was pulled under a
swirl of dirty water.
Walls of Water 3

Debris hit her, tore off her clothes, and she felt a strong pain in
her pelvis. When she resurfaced, Simon was nowhere to be seen.
Then the wave covered her again.
She thought she would die. Hope revived when she came close to
a palm tree, but her attempts to cling to it failed. Luckily another tree
appeared in her way, and with great effort she grabbed one of its
branches. Although debris hit her repeatedly, assailing her naked,
battered body, she clung to the trunk. Desperate voices could be
heard from neighboring trees.
As the first shock receded, Petra thought of Simon. He was a good
swimmer, so she hoped that he had made it to a safe spot. She prayed
for him, and she prayed that the tree holding her would stand the
force of the stream.
Time passed. Petra often had the illusion that this was just a night-
mare from which she would awake soon, but the pain brought her
back to reality. Although she felt very tired and her arms had grown
numb, she knew that she had to stay put. Between ocean and sky, her
life hung in the balance.
Eight hours later, two courageous Thai men rescued her. They had
to handle her carefully because every move made her cry. She would
go through a lot of pain in the days to come. Fortunately the immedi-
ate danger had passed. She spent several weeks in a Thai hospital
with internal injuries and a shattered pelvis, and she needed several
months to recover completely.
But Petra never saw Simon again. Some human remains found in
March 2005 were identified as his. He met the fate of the more than
200,000 people who happened to be in the path of destruction on
that godforsaken day. The saddest part of the story is that most of
those lives could have been saved.

How It Happened

On 26 December at 6:58 AM local time, an earthquake shook the

Indian Ocean, off the Indonesian coast of northern Sumatra, 250
kilometers southeast of Banda Aceh. Initial estimates put its magni-
tude at 9.0. The shock was felt as far as the Bay of Bengal. The earth-
quake occurred between the India and Burma plates as the former
4 Chapter 1

Figure 1.1. The shores affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami on 26 December 2004

shifted beneath the latter, raising the ocean’s bottom by 10 meters in

some places. This event triggered a tsunami, which hit the beaches
bordering the Indian Ocean in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand,
Somalia, Myanmar, the Maldives, Mauritius, Malaysia, Tanzania, Sey-
chelles, Kenya, and Bangladesh (fig. 1.1.). No tsunami ever has
claimed so many lives.
Some scientists flew to Indonesia to learn more about the cause
of the disaster. Others began to analyze the data. Richard Gross, a
geophysicist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reported that a
shift of mass toward Earth’s center caused the planet to move one
millionth of a second faster and tilted its axis at the poles by an inch.
Seismologists Seth Stein and Emile Okal of Northwestern University
claimed later that the earthquake had been much larger than initially
thought, namely, 9.3 on the moment-magnitude scale, for which a one-
point increase corresponds to about a thirtyfold effect.
Such reevaluations are not unusual. The rupture zone had been
bigger than reported, the initial estimates ignoring the slower shifts
along the fault. To extract these data, Stein and Okal relied on theo-
retical results they had developed three decades earlier with Robert
Geller, now a professor at the University of Tokyo.
Walls of Water 5

Shortly after the earthquake, Sumatra’s coast was hit by a wall of

water higher than the coconut palms lining its beaches; the tsunami,
however, traveled almost two hours before reaching Thailand, India,
and Sri Lanka. A warning procedure, like the ones used in North
America and Japan, might have reduced the casualties to a minimum.
Alas, such a system was nonexistent in the affected zones.
The ideal scenario would have been to forecast the tsunami and
take suitable measures days or hours in advance. But are such predic-
tions possible?

Solitary Waves

To forecast events, we must know how they form and develop and
what laws govern them. Tsunamis occur rarely and look like big wind-
generated waves, but instead of breaking at the shore, they go inland.
Progress toward understanding them has been slow. The nature of
tsunamis remained unclear until the end of the nineteenth century.
All their possible causes became apparent only several decades ago.
Research on solitary waves began in August 1834 when a young
engineer named John Scott Russell conducted some experiments on
the Union Canal near Edinburgh in Scotland. The railroad competi-
tion threatened the horse-drawn boat business, and Russell had to
assess the efficiency of the conversion from horsepower to steam. In
his report, he described the following occurrence.
As a rope got entangled in the device used for measurements, the
boat suddenly stopped and the water “accumulated round the prow
of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then rolled forward with
great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation—a
rounded, smooth and well defined heap of water—which continued
its course along the channel without change of form or diminution
of speed.”
This wave of translation—as he called it—intrigued him, so he
“followed it on horseback, and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of
eight or nine miles an hour, preserving its original figure some thirty
feet long and a foot to a foot and a half in height,” until he lost it in
the meanders of the channel. This event was the start of a struggle to
6 Chapter 1

understand an unusual phenomenon and—what would be an even

more difficult task—to prove the existence of water waves that could
travel forever.
In 1830 he invented a steam carriage, but his undertaking failed
because the officials opposed its implementation. Russell had more
success with the Union Canal Company, which hired him to study the
connection between wave generation and resistance to motion. This
opportunity had also been triggered by chance. When a horse drag-
ging a boat on a Glasgow canal took fright and ran off, the vessel’s
prow rose and the boat sailed faster. Russell understood that the soli-
tary wave caused the reduced resistance and the rise of the boat, so
he focused his research on the wave.
He built a water tank, generated waves of translation by releasing
a column of water through a sliding panel, and performed hundreds
of experiments, recording the details he observed. Although the
wave’s fast speed was remarkable, Russell was more impressed by its
persistence. He had expected the wave to shrink after traveling long
enough, but the tests proved him wrong. The solitary wave looked
more stable than anything he had seen before.
The wave of translation appeared only if the boat reached a critical
speed. Below it, the vessel met water resistance; above it, the wave
became self-sustained, allowing the boat to move easier. After re-
peated experiments, Russell concluded that the wave’s velocity de-
pends both on the depth of the water and on the wave’s height.
His result explains why tsunamis move at high speed in midocean
but slow down close to the shore, and why boats overcome water resis-
tance in shallow canals as they reach the critical speed. In deep seas,
however, ships are slow, moving well below the critical speed, so by
trying to move faster they encounter more resistance. Russell solved
this problem by designing hollow-lined prows, which part the water
without ruffling its surface. He noted that pirates, to whom speed was
essential, had built similar prows in the past.
Russell also studied the interaction between waves. Intuition sug-
gests that, at impact, waves traveling in opposite directions break. But
this never happens. They meet, merge for an instant, and pass
through each other unchanged. This phenomenon shows why the
idea to kill a tsunami through a collision with an artificially generated
wave doesn’t work.
Walls of Water 7

Apart from conducting some 20,000 experiments with toy models

and ships ranging from a few hundred grams to 1,300 tons, Russell
spent years analyzing the shape and motion of the translation wave.
Among other things, he learned that, unlike wind-generated waves,
which involve vertical motion, the solitary wave is a horizontal shift
of mass with a shape about six times longer than tall. So instead of
moving up and down, as ordinary waves do, a tsunami pushes ahead
like a shelf of water.
Russell also had an original idea about tides, which he viewed as
very large solitary waves. He divided his tidal theory in two parts, one
founded on celestial mechanics, to explain water elevation in seas
and oceans, and the other based on hydrodynamics, to account for
the swell of small basins, rivers, and canals.
Russell presented his research in several articles, which he submit-
ted to different meetings attended by mathematicians, physicists, en-
gineers, and astronomers interested in fluid dynamics. Among them
was George Biddell Airy, who opposed Russell’s results. Airy had a
theory of his own, and he deemed the solitary wave impossible.

Meeting Resistance

No fancy idea permeates the scientific world with ease, particularly

when a personality opposes it. Airy was no ordinary scientist. He held
the Lucasian Professorship at Cambridge, a position Isaac Newton
had occupied in the seventeenth century, and had the most envied
astronomical job in Britain, that of astronomer royal. He would later
preside over the Royal Society and accept a knighthood, but only
after declining it three times because he could not afford the fees.
Airy made important contributions to science, from improving the
orbital theory of Venus and the Moon to a mathematical study of the
rainbow. He preferred applications to theory and was often at odds
with his colleagues about the research direction in which important
mathematics prizes should go.
Outside his professional work, Airy showed broad interests. He
read history and poetry and was keen about architecture, geology,
engineering, and religion. He even tried to identify the location of
Julius Caesar’s landing in Britain and the place from where the
8 Chapter 1

Roman consul departed. But later in life he spent most of his time in
administration.
When Russell announced his results, Airy was still very active in
research. The astronomer royal had constructed his own theory of
waves, which he had initially based on the work of the French mathe-
matician Pierre Simon Laplace. But because Laplace’s equations ap-
plied only to shallow waves, Airy came up with some improvements.
His goal was to predict the height of tides. Alas, he failed in this en-
deavor as much as his French predecessor did; their calculations
didn’t come even close to reality.
Airy, however, considered his theory suitable for understanding
waves. In an article published in 1845, he praised Russell’s experi-
ments because his own theory explained them. But he warned against
Russell’s analysis. The equations Airy developed could not account
for large shifts of mass, so an everlasting wave made no sense to him.
Although this authoritative judgment failed to shake Russell’s be-
lief in the value of his discovery, the Scottish engineer received an-
other blow soon. In 1846 the new leader of British hydrodynamics,
Cambridge mathematician George Gabriel Stokes, published a paper
about the state of the field. Stokes’s point was clear: permanent trans-
lation waves could not exist.

Further Opposition

Age twenty-seven at that time, Stokes was eleven years younger than
Russell, and his paper confirmed his leading role in the field. In 1846,
when this report appeared, he could not accept the idea of a sea wave
that travels thousands of miles undisturbed. In his opinion, waves of
translation had to shrink, and the stability Russell proclaimed was
illusory because he had drawn his conclusions from experiments per-
formed in short tanks.
Stokes’s interest in waves faded soon, but he returned to them time
and again. In October 1879 he wrote to William Thomson, better
known as Lord Kelvin: “I have in mind when I have occasion to go to
London to take a run down to Brighton if a rough sea should be
telegraphed, that I may study the forms of waves about to break. I
Walls of Water 9

have a sort of imperfect memory that swells breaking on a sandy

beach became at one phase very approximately wedge-shapes.” When
Kelvin invited him “to see and feel the waves” on his yacht, Stokes
answered in September 1880: “You ask if I have done anything more
about the greatest possible wave. I cannot say that I have, at least
anything to mention mathematically. For it is not a very mathematical
process taking off my shoes and stockings, tucking up my trousers as
high as I could, and wading out into the sea to get in line with the
crest of some small waves that were breaking on a sandy beach.”
Stokes’s change of mind about the value of practical observations
stemmed from his new conviction that Russell had been right. Three
weeks later he wrote to his friend again: “Contrary to an opinion
expressed in my report [of 1846], I am now disposed to think there
is such a thing as a solitary wave that can be theoretically propagated
without degradation.” Kelvin disagreed. His opposition resided in
some technicalities related to the mathematical model, which was not
transparent to the subtleties of solitary waves.
Russell never learned about this exchange or of Stokes’s approval
of his work. At that time, he had lost his ambitions. In the 1860s he
had suffered several blows: his attempts to build an iron vessel called
Great Eastern failed, he got involved in a financial dispute about an
armament contract, and he was expelled from the Council of the
Institute of Civil Engineers. These setbacks made him withdraw on
the Isle of Wight, in southern England, where he died on 8 June 1882,
at age seventy-four.
At the time of these developments, unknown to Russell, Kelvin,
and Stokes, a young French mathematician named Joseph Boussinesq
was also studying solitary waves.

The French Connection

Two mathematical giants—a Frenchman, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert,

and a Swiss, Leonhard Euler—had initiated the study of waves more
than a century earlier. In 1747 d’Alembert won the prize of the Prus-
sian Academy for his pioneering work on partial differential equa-
tions, which model many physical phenomena, including waves. In
10 Chapter 1

spite of its sound mathematics, however, the paper’s physics left much
to be desired. For instance, d’Alembert erroneously stated that tides,
not heat, generate winds.
Nevertheless, Euler saw the value of d’Alembert’s methods, devel-
oped them further, and found their true physical meaning. But the
Swiss mathematician gave d’Alembert little credit, a fact that trig-
gered animosity between them. In spite of this rivalry, both d’Alem-
bert and Euler followed each other’s papers to lay the foundations of
wave theory. Their ideas were further developed by two other mathe-
matical geniuses: Joseph Louis Lagrange and Pierre Simon Laplace.
In 1776 Laplace published his celebrated theory of tides, which
was based on a model for the propagation of small waves in shallow
water. Lagrange extended Laplace’s ideas to deep-water waves, but
many of his assertions were speculative. The two mathematicians
showed more interest in the shape of the surface than in how the
fluid moved. Consequently neither of them could guess the existence
of the solitary wave.
A step forward was made in 1813, when the Academy of Sciences
established a prestigious prize. Laplace drafted the question: “An in-
finitely deep fluid mass, initially at rest, is set into motion by a given
force. It is asked to determine the form of the external surface of the
fluid and the velocity of every molecule on the surface after a given
time.” The mathematician who came close to solving the problem
was Siméon Denis Poisson, the most brilliant disciple of Laplace. In
his midthirties at that time, Poisson was already established as a pro-
fessor at École Polytechnique and astronomer at the Bureau des Lon-
gitudes in Paris. But since he was also a member of the jury, Poisson
could not compete for the prize.
The award went in 1816 to the twenty-seven-year-old Augustin
Louis Cauchy, best known today for putting calculus on a rigorous
foundation. Notable is the significant overlap between the results of
Poisson and Cauchy, though they worked independently. Both men
used a theory their countryman Jean Joseph Fourier had developed
a decade earlier, but unlike Poisson, Cauchy re-created most of its
tools from scratch.
A problem Cauchy analyzed was the disturbance created by the
sudden immersion of a solid body into a fluid. This issue was close to
Walls of Water 11

the study of a boat’s motion on water. Cauchy, however, didn’t go far

enough to see any connection with the solitary wave. His failure
comes as no surprise: nobody before Russell, and very few of Russell’s
peers, thought that this phenomenon existed. Among those who did
was the French mathematician Joseph Boussinesq, who succeeded in
going beyond Russell’s practical experiments, laying the foundations
of a solid theoretical framework.
In 1871, four years after obtaining his doctoral degree, Boussinesq
became acquainted with Russell’s work and the wave experiments of
the French hydraulician Henri Bazin. Boussinesq had already redis-
covered some known results. This exercise now led him to the solitary
wave, whose existence he could prove. His solution was based on an
ingenious method applied to Euler’s equations. Although Lagrange
had used the same idea a century earlier, he failed to push it through
because he lacked the more refined mathematical techniques Bous-
sinesq employed.
But Boussinesq was not the only one who rigorously proved the
existence of the solitary wave. Five years later, independently of him,
an English mathematician reached the same conclusion. His name
was John William Strutt or Lord Rayleigh. Russell, Stokes, and Kelvin
knew nothing of this feat.

The Tricks of History

John William Strutt was born the same year as Boussinesq, 1842, in
Witham, Essex, as the son of the second Baron Rayleigh of Terling
Place. Nobody in his family of landowners showed any interest in
science, and John proved to be average in school. But his talent for
mathematics sprouted in 1861 after he began to study at Cambridge.
Stokes influenced his intellectual development, though he never en-
couraged Strutt to pursue research. After graduation Strutt was
elected a fellow of Trinity College, and at the age of thirty he inher-
ited his father’s title.
In spite of traveling widely as a young man, Rayleigh dedicated
much time to research. His theory of scattering, published in 1871,
gave the first correct explanation of why the sky is blue. In 1879 he
12 Chapter 1

was appointed Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics at Cam-

bridge. This opportunity helped Rayleigh lay the foundations for his
work on the density of gases and put him on the path of discovering
the chemical element argon, contributions for which he was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904.
While in his early thirties, Rayleigh became interested in wave the-
ory and in Russell’s work. He started like Boussinesq from Lagrange’s
principles but then distanced himself from the French school. Ray-
leigh had an idea that simplified his computations. Unlike Bous-
sinesq, he looked at the wave as if riding on it, using a coordinate
system bound to the wave, not fixed somewhere in space.
Some twenty years later, in 1895, the Dutch mathematician Die-
derik Johannes Korteweg and his doctoral student Gustav de Vries
improved Rayleigh’s method and extended it to the study of other
types of waves, including the oscillatory ones and those of evolving
shape. The equation they derived was a version of Boussinesq’s.
Korteweg and de Vries also found the solution that corresponds to
the wave of translation and duly mentioned the priority of Boussinesq
and Rayleigh. But they showed no excitement about this rediscovery,
seeing little merit in going where others had been. Like most mathe-
maticians, they were more interested in obtaining original results and
cared less about what applications those would have. Thus they em-
phasized “the new type of long stationary waves,” called cnoidal today,
which was their discovery.
The paper of the Dutch mathematicians made no immediate im-
pression. Their peers considered the problem of the solitary wave
completely solved and were seeking new (and more exotic) phenom-
ena related to the motion of liquids. Later, when the experts under-
stood the significance of this equation, they called it Korteweg-de Vries.
History played a trick on Boussinesq, who is only briefly mentioned
in the field. For the two Dutch mathematicians, this was their most
important achievement. Their merit cannot be denied, but they
didn’t excel in research as much as Boussinesq and Rayleigh did.
Korteweg had become a professor at the University of Amsterdam in
1881, from where he retired in 1918 without publishing other im-
portant papers. De Vries achieved even less. He gave up research
Walls of Water 13

after writing two more articles about cyclones and made a living as a
schoolteacher.
The Korteweg-de Vries equation, however, took on a life of its own.
If, during the first decades of the twentieth century, it didn’t stand
out in any particular way, this was about to change. An apparently
unrelated experiment would propel it to the limelight of mathemati-
cal research. The reason for this turn of events was the role played by
an Italian physicist, also known as “the father of the atomic bomb.”

A Numerical Experiment

Enrico Fermi, the key nuclear physicist of the Manhattan Project, also
had a crucial contribution to the theory of waves. It all started a few
years after the war, during one of Fermi’s visits to Los Alamos. Among
the friends the Italian scientist had made while working on the bomb
was the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. Fermi had used his
1938 Nobel Prize award ceremony in Stockholm to flee fascist Italy
and cross the Atlantic Ocean. Ulam had come to the United States a
few months before Fermi as a Harvard junior fellow. When his con-
tract expired, the Pole received a faculty position at the University of
Wisconsin, where he engaged in mathematical research with military
applications.
In the middle of the war, Ulam received an invitation to join a
secret project in New Mexico. He was told little about it, so he felt no
wish to go. But after learning the names of those who had recently
vanished from campus, and suspecting a connection with the project,
he agreed to go. This decision changed his life, propelling him into
the circles of the world’s mathematical elite. Part of his rise to fame
was due to his collaboration with Fermi.
The postwar American scientific establishment was split about the
newly invented electronic computers. Fermi took the side of those
who welcomed them. In the early 1950s he began to think about find-
ing some significant physics problem that would merit an investiga-
tion on one of the very first electronic computers, MANIAC I, which
happened to be located at Los Alamos. He decided to study how crys-
tals evolve toward thermal equilibrium.
14 Chapter 1

Crystals are modeled as particles kept together by forces. The ensu-

ing structure resembles the builder’s scaffolding—the bars corre-
sponding to the forces and the junctions to the particles. When not
in equilibrium, crystals behave like structures whose bars bend and
stretch. This three-dimensional model reflects reality quite well. A
simpler, less realistic model is a two-dimensional one, which would
look more like a chicken wire or a fishing net. A one-dimensional
model would resemble a chain.
Apparently there is no overlap between waves and crystals, and
Fermi never thought to connect them. But a bit of imagination re-
veals that a wave’s surface looks like a bedsheet, which is nothing but
a fishing net with tiny holes. Similarly, the spatial waves resemble
“soft” scaffoldings with many joints and short bars. Therefore under-
standing the motion of crystals could shed light on the propagation
of waves.
To keep computations easy, Fermi and Ulam decided to work on
the one-dimensional case—the chain. However, in order to imple-
ment a suitable numerical technique, they needed an expert in com-
putational methods. Thus a third Los Alamos expert joined the team.
His name was John Pasta.
Fermi, Pasta, and Ulam drafted a research plan in 1952 and did
their first numerical experiments the following summer. It was
Fermi’s idea that, instead of performing the standard calculus for a
physical problem, one should take particular examples and test them
with computer simulations. This approach would not only stimulate
the development of wave theory but also prove crucial in the study of
nonlinear phenomena—one of the main research directions in the
mathematical sciences during the last three decades of the twentieth
century.
The numerical experiments on the “chain crystal” revealed the
existence of a solution that looked like the solitary wave, as if a snake
curved its body into a bump that moved smoothly from head to tail.
Fermi was not impressed, but he changed his mind soon. This revela-
tion was probably his last. During the second half of 1954, the stom-
ach cancer he was suffering from began to spread, and he died at the
end of November, less than two months after turning fifty-four.
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