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Going into resonance

Nature Physics volume 15, page 203 (2019) Cite this article

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In 1965, in his famous Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman suggested that the resonance concept had become so influential that every new volume of the Physical Review would feature at least one resonance curve — the characteristic absorption peak in the spectral region around the natural internal frequency of some probed oscillatory system. And yet, the modern familiarity of the concept obscures an unusual history of extremely slow recognition, full appreciation taking some 300 years. As Jörn Bleck-Neuhaus of the University of Bremen notes in a recent historical review (preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.08353; 2018), few scientific ideas of comparable importance have come to be appreciated so slowly.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Galileo noted that one man pulling in the right way on a heavy pendulum could drive it into such large motion that it could then readily lift six men into the air. No doubt others had seen similar effects before; Galileo recorded it. He could offer no mathematical treatment, however, and came to some very incorrect conclusions about what happens when a periodic force drives a naturally oscillatory system. In particular, he concluded that the resulting motion could never be made to deviate from natural inherent frequency of the oscillating system. This view, apparently, suited his belief that the tides could not be driven by the forcing of the Moon, but must have some other origin.

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  1. Nature Physics https://www.nature.com/naturephysics

    Mark Buchanan

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  1. Mark Buchanan
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Correspondence to Mark Buchanan.

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Buchanan, M. Going into resonance. Nat. Phys. 15, 203 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0458-z

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