Giant Waves and Sea Serpents

Anecdotal ephemera are usually not the business of science. It normally deals with repeatable phenomena. This is not always understood by the public, and tragically not by all scientists, some of whom have been tempted to make themselves foolish by publicly dismissing things such as monster waves and huge sea serpents, not to mention alien spacecraft and the fairies.

Technological breakthroughs have allowed some ephemera to be brought under meaningful study. For generations, old seadogs have been trying to tell scientists of the danger of ships being overwhelmed by giant waves. They have been pooh-poohed by sneering savants, whose theories, based on the normal probability distribution, told them that such waves were vanishingly rare. The surprising rate of ships disappearing was attributed to human error and crime.

A recent U.S. orbital satellite, equipped with powerful radar to measure wave sizes, has revealed that the seamen were right. Dangerously large waves are hundreds of times more common than theory had predicted. As the physicists scramble to repair their theories, the naval architects are left scratching their heads. The risk to shipping is much greater than expected. If an excessively large wave comes along, the ship is supported by wave crests at bow and stern, but not in the middle. Its back breaks, and it sinks very quickly, often without distress signal or survivors.

From ancient times, seamen have told tales of  ferocious sea serpents which wrapped themselves around ships and pulled them over. Very large ocean-going fishing boats, with huge deep-sea nets, have in recent years landed giant squid. They have found a complete baby one, and the tentacle of an adult. Extrapolating from the tentacle, the adult is much greater in total length than a blue whale. These creatures usually stay at great depth, and rarely venture to the surface to grapple with ships. When they have done so, the survivors have been mocked, and told to stop talking nonsense. Yet we now know they were telling the truth. The tentacles would seem snake-like to someone who couldn't see the squid's submerged body. Such attacks are now very rare, possibly because modern ocean-going ships are too big and fast for the squid to catch.

Some people claim to have seen fairies. I recently heard someone sneering at this, saying he 'preferred to take a more scientific approach'. Was he doing so? He could not have been more wrong. Science has nothing to say about fairies. How can we establish that there are no fairies in someone's garden, if we don't know how to develop a fairy detector? Fairy theory has not advanced to the point where we have the vaguest idea how to do this. The problem is more fundamental than that of the giant waves. So the whole topic remains outside the realm of science, and that is that. I myself am sceptical about fairies, and suspect that they are figments of over-active imagination. I do not pretend that my hunch on this owes anything to science. It is merely a hunch.

It's a sad fact that many confuse dogmatic scepticism with 'being scientific', their own conservative prejudices with rationality. It has held up the advance of science on many occasions.  Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, allegedly said, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it".