Observation of the soliton (wave of translation)
Observación del solitón (onda de traslación)
- Date
- agosto de 1834 · confidence high
- Place
- Union Canal, near Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
- Credited to
- John Scott Russell
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Watching a horse-drawn barge, engineer Russell saw a solitary wave about a meter tall form and followed it on horseback for several kilometres without it changing shape or losing speed, something that contradicted the hydrodynamics of the day.
Russell's observation was met with skepticism by the scientific community of his time, which considered it incompatible with Newton and Bernoulli's wave theory; it was not fully understood until the Korteweg–de Vries equation, sixty years later.
What it led to
- The Korteweg–de Vries equation (1895), which mathematically describes the phenomenon
- Modern soliton theory in fiber optics, plasmas and nonlinear equations