perfidy

Scientists have recently (this millennia) come to the conclusion that large rogue waves do, in fact exist.

Over the centuries, many accounts have told of monster waves that battered and sank ships. In 1933 in the North Pacific, the Navy oiler Ramapo encountered a huge wave. The crew, calm enough to triangulate from the ship’s superstructure, estimated its height at 112 feet.

In 1966, the Italian cruise ship Michelangelo was steaming toward New York when a giant wave tore a hole in its superstructure, smashed heavy glass 80 feet above the waterline, and killed a crewman and two passengers. In 1978, the München, a German barge carrier, sank in the Atlantic. Surviving bits of twisted wreckage suggested that it surrendered to a wave of great force.

Despite such accounts, many oceanographers were skeptical. The human imagination tended to embellish, they said.

Moreover, bobbing ships were terrible reference points for trying to determine the size of onrushing objects with any kind of accuracy. Their mathematical models predicted that giant waves were statistical improbabilities that should arise once every 10,000 years or so.

That began to change on New Year’s Day in 1995, when a rock-steady oil platform in the North Sea produced what was considered the first hard evidence of a rogue wave. The platform bore a laser designed to measure wave height. During a furious storm, it registered an 84-foot giant.

Then, in February 2000, a British oceanographic research vessel fighting its way through a gale west of Scotland measured titans of up to 95 feet, “the largest waves ever recorded by scientific instruments,” seven researchers wrote in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

It's an interesting article in its own right, but I was struck by the similarity to the scientific establishment's resistance to the idea that rocks might fall from the skies. The words meteorology and meteorite describe the study of weather and extraplanetary debris falling to earth. The reason the names are so similar is that scientists refused to believe, for decades and despite the evidence, that the rocks that fell were anything but atmospheric phenomena.

How will we get to the singularity with such stubborn researchers? And indeed, one might ask, "Why do they hate the rogue waves' freedom? Sailors have been reporting these waves for centuries. But oceanographers told them, "Silly seamen, our models say that a wave like you describe could only happen once in ten thousand years. And you already reported one. So you must be lying. Your ship must have sank due to pilot error." The power of what you know you know is for most people inescapable. Like an overactive spam filter, we reject those parts of reality that fail to match our model of reality. Truly, acceptance of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. Hey, maybe we don't know everything about oceans. What if - just sayin, now, what if there really were big honking waves? Five years later, you've got the beginnings of a warning system and a deeper understanding.