Water is a nonlinear medium. If you drop a stone in a pond, it creates a certain wave pattern (and NOT a single travelling pulse.) If you build a little wave-generator which produces a time-reversed version of that pattern, the resulting "backwards-chirped" wave will compress together as it travels, finally forming a little splash. You can improve this effect by building several hundred of these devices, laying them out in a circle on the pond, then triggering them all. Arrange the center of curvature to coincide with the location of an unsuspecting duck!

OK, now line your country's seacoast with hundreds of large gasoline-powered wave-generators (old barges with huge oscillating concrete weights?) When this phase-array system is driven appropriately for several hours, the pattern of ocean waves it emits will converge on a certain distant spot and for a few minutes create a region with 500ft high mega-surf, or perhaps briefly open holes in the ocean which can fold an aircraft carrier in half.
-- wbeaty, Jun 21 2002

More evil-genius stuff http://amasci.com/hoax.html
Wbeaty's link as a link. [StarChaser, Jun 21 2002, last modified Oct 21 2004]

Ripple tank simulation http://www.falstad.com/ripple/
Practice here. [omegatron, Jun 01 2005]

Baked! Kind of. http://www.mes.co.j...ew/new20060724.html
By Akishima Laboratories in Japan. [wiml, Jul 27 2006]

Baked! Kind of: (video ) http://www.dailymot...ch-institute_webcam
Huge version, generates anti-chirped 'ocean hole' [wbeaty, Jun 30 2010]

Angel, actually, it IS original to the poster. Note the username 'wbeaty', as in 'William Beaty', on the quoted page. He's been quoted several times here, by quite a few people including me, and eventually came in to see what all the noise was about, if I remember correctly.

Wbeaty, use the link named 'link' just below your name to actually create links.
-- StarChaser, Jun 21 2002


It's a nice idea (and a cool website) but I think the energy requirements would be astronomical.
-- pottedstu, Jun 21 2002


Offending annotation removed. Apologies to all concerned. And it's certainly a cool site - I've been looking at it quite a bit recently.
-- angel, Jun 21 2002


a) I think the homepage link should go on the user's account page.
b) Surely the energy isn't completely dissipated in the central 'splash', but would be 'reflected' out and back. If that's the case, what are the implications?
-- phoenix, Jun 21 2002


"Holes" in the ocean is one theory around the Bermuda triangle business. Trapped gas escaping en masse from the ocean floor rises up and creates a huge opening underneath a ship, causing it to 'fall' into the ocean. Makes sense to me.

I note the words "time-reversed"... you zoomed by this rather quickly. A small technical snag there, perhaps.
-- waugsqueke, Jun 21 2002


Phoenix: You are correct. Any energy not absorbed at the central asymptotic event woud be reflected isotropically. You would get your "wave" back, a finite time later. You could elect to re-absorb the energy and store it for re-use (using a large vesion of the Salter "Duck" wave-energy extractor), destriy it with a precisely timed antiphase pulse (wasteful), or "boost" it for a second "shot". Controling the synchronsation of the wave generators to focus the wave with any accuracy over oceanic distances would be demanding, but might be more practical in an enclosed space like the mediterranean. The system does not need to be circumferential to be effective. I suspect a parabolic array, using phased-array triggering to "aim" the focus point, would work equally wel, ,with the added benefit that the wavefront would subesquently disperse (fairly) harmessly having passed though the focus.
-- 8th of 7, Jun 21 2002


//When this phase-array system is driven appropriately for several hours//

During which time the crew of the target vessel are, presumably, sitting around drinking coffee and playing cards?
-- DrBob, Jun 21 2002


DrBob: No. The officers do that. The crew sit around smoking, watching pornographic videos, and discussing football, and the Marines play their own specialised version of "trivial pursuit" with multiple choice answers and mind-taxing questions like "How many beans make five ?" and "What is your favourite colour ?". The civilians who are just there to observe stand in the command centre (trying hard to ignore the lone rating who has his PlayStation plugged into the main aid defence radar display) saying "Guys ? Guys ? I really think you sould come and look at this. Guys ? Please ?". Been there, done that, worn the lifejacket.
-- 8th of 7, Jun 21 2002


Love the site. Especially the 'being chased around with a ball of lightning' idea.
-- RayfordSteele, Jun 22 2002


If the wave is reflected back to the source, is it gonna be possible to make it about 8ft, and have it arrive at about 7am. Thats usually the best time to get a surf in before all the hung-over townies get out here to the beach with their 9ft malibus and kayaks and god knows what, cluttering up the take off zone and dropping in all over the place. Not to mention leaving fast food wrappers and dog-ends all over the beach. (who in their right mind eats food out of a bucket anyway).
-- dijit, Jun 22 2002


This is Bill Beaty posting? Wow. Well, just FYI, I'm that guy who emailed you about the maglev cradle thing but was too lazy to build it. I'm more a halfbaker than a baker, but I'm gettin' there...

Anyhow, wouldn't these wave generators have to be very precisely timed at extremely, insanely low frequencies, as well as have huge amplitudes? If you had a giant wall for reflection/amplification of the waves, then this could work on a pond or lake scale, but how would you cause all of the waves to converge to their destinations precisely timed given other oceanic currents, wind, waves, etc?

This may be nitpicky, but just y'know... testing the limits of this great wonder of destruction :)
-- Crazy Bastard, Jun 29 2002


Could you use explosives as the wave generators? You'd need a computer system to calculate the appropriate times to detonate them - then you could aim your hole/spout to coincide with the position at which the enemy was anchored at, even if they wern't positioned as a semicircle/ parabola..

Hey, this could be reversed to wash out ports or whatever, especially if you could use the coastline to funnel the wave, and attack at high tide.

Oh dear, thats another terror weapon invented.
-- Loris, Aug 02 2002


Glad to see that this idea is up and working.I've just spent a day surfing some of the bestest waves for aaages! I thought it was a crap idea until dijit chimed in. Hope that not too many people got damaged when the fleet sank, tho. Or didn't that part of it work? Thankyou evil genius.
-- briandamage, Aug 03 2002


Hm... Weeeeellll..... IF a matter to energy and vice versa converter is ever invented, then THAT could effectively be used as a resonator... I don't know how else you're going to move such huge quantities of water efficiently.
-- Crazy Bastard, Aug 11 2002


[quietguy567], I think the problem you'd have with an HE-generated waveis that most of the energy would disspiate rapidly as a supersonic hydrostatic shock wave, plus a lot of superficial turbulence (depending how deep the charges were dropped); which, while dramtic and locally damaging, would not produce the sort of low-frequency high-amplitude long-range persistant waveform that's called for; a Heaviside step-function, not a sine wave. Look up Soliton waves for more info.
-- 8th of 7, Nov 15 2002


Mm... supersonic hydrostatic shock wave... sounds delicious.
-- Crazy Bastard, Feb 02 2003


Or setting up a huge array of stereo systems to send out low frequency waves to collapse buildings at the focus point.

(Not that we should be collapsing buildings...)

I've imagined for a while this sci-fi Terminator-like character that has an innate sense of wavelike behavior. Wiggling one end of a long chain so that the other end lifts upwards and off of its hook, vibrating an object a small amount in one place that causes a much larger vibration at a resonant focus point that just happens to be where the bad guy is standing, etc...

// Anyhow, wouldn't these wave generators have to be very precisely timed at extremely, insanely low frequencies, as well as have huge amplitudes? //

Precisely timed? More or less. That's not too difficult, though.

Huge amplitudes? Not necessarily. Just use lots of small floaties with submerged weights that they can pull closer and push farther away. All the little circular wavefronts combine into a giant focused semicircular wavefront in one direction (this is the principle behind ultrasound).

You could just scatter buttloads of them throughout your bay (not necessarily in a circle) and use mesh networking to coordinate them to flip over any approaching bad guys.

// but how would you cause all of the waves to converge to their destinations precisely timed given other oceanic currents, wind, waves, etc? //

Waves travel through each other, so those things wouldn't be a (serious) problem. Non-linear waves do interact with each other, but I doubt it would ruin the idea.

Of course this is all ignoring the fact that the bad guys have cruise missiles...
-- omegatron, Jun 01 2005


Ocean's not an idealized medium. An assortment of pesky secondary effects would render this approach impossible.
-- crater, Jun 01 2005


[Waugs]//the Bermuda triangle business//
I thought the whole point about the Bermuda triangle business is that there is no Bermuda triangle business? Apparently ships and planes are no more likely to mysteriously vanish there than anywhere else. So I'm told. But back to the idea - [+] whether its feasible or not.
-- Basepair, Jun 01 2005



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