Fascinating article on how things synchronize in nature. My interest though is how science popularizers talk. The whole buildup is this old mystery and how it gets solved. Then the last paragraph walks it all back. This is typical. Read the article from the link -- I only excerpted a bit.
Quoting from a Smithsonian article...
Christiaan Huygens was a busy scholar. Among his many achievements, the Dutch scientist figured out the shape of Saturn's rings and discovered that planet's largest moon, Titan. He founded the theory that light travels as a wave, and he invented the pendulum clock. Huygens, it seems, couldn't even turn off his scientific mind when he was under the weather.
In 1665 he was ill and stuck in bed, watching two pendulum clocks that were attached to a beam in his house. He noticed the pendulums started to swing in time with each other, no matter whether the clocks had been started or stopped at different times or what position the pendulums started in. Huygens was baffled. There had to be some way the clocks "spoke" to each other, but he lacked the precise instruments necessary to measure interaction between the clocks. So he chalked it up to mysterious movements transmitted by the air or the physical connection in the beam, and there the matter rested for more than 300 years.
Now, physicists revisiting the 17th-century conundrum think the answer may lie in sound waves. ......
Jonatan Peña Ramirez, a researcher at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, has also published studies of the Huygens' clock phenomenon. He says physicists like to study this system because it mimics other cycles in nature. "Similar phenomena can be observed in biological systems, where some cycles inside the human body may synchronize in a natural way," he says.
However, he isn't yet convinced that sound energy is the culprit for the clocks. "If you replace the driving mechanism in the clocks by a smooth mechanism, i.e., a mechanism that does not apply [discrete] impulses to the clocks, still one can be able to observe synchronization," he says. As far as he's concerned, "Huygens' synchronization … is far from being solved."
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/can-sound-explian-350-year-old-clock-mystery-180956022/#9ekmf3VpK0pO95pB.99
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