Re: coriolis situation

[Robert A Cohen <bbq@ESU.EDU>]

Anders Persson published an article in the Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society (July 1998) entitled "How do we understand the
Coriolis Force".  He argues that "Coriolis's papers do not deal with the
atmosphere or even the rotation of the earth, but with the transfer of
energy in rotating systems like waterwheels" and that Coriolis was only
interested in the Coriolis force "only in combination with the centrifugal
force".

The article also contains the following information.  Coriolis published
his paper in 1835. The idea of the earth's rotation influencing motions
was started with Hadley and his trade winds (17th century).  Hadley,
however, only considered the effect of relative motion (i.e., different
latitudes travel at different speeds) and thus only considered the
deflection of objects that moved north/south, not east/west (BTW, this was
the explanation mistakenly given to me for the Coriolis force in my first
college course, which was physical geography, not physics). In the 19th
century, Faucault demonstrated that a simple pendulum would be deflected
by the earth's rotation.  Ferrel (1856) and Buys Ballot (1857) both
concluded that the direction of the wind is parallel to the isobars, but
Buys Ballot's conclusion was empirically based whereas Ferrel's was based
on Newton's and Laplace's works (not Coriolis's, apparently).

----------------------------------------------------------
| Robert Cohen               Department of Physics       |
|                            East Stroudsburg University |
| bbq@esu.edu                East Stroudsburg, PA  18301 |
| http://www.esu.edu/~bbq/   (570) 422-3428              |
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On Wed, 11 Aug 1999, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:

> What follows is from Encyclopedia Brittanica CD.
> I assume it is legal to cut and paste, and to share one
> item over the Internet.
>
> Wasn't École Polytechnique originally created by
> Napoleon to train military specialists? This can explain
> the "mechanism" by which ideas influenced some
> practical applications. But this is only a guess. The
> article does not mention "water wheels" which were
> suggested earlier in this thread.
>
> Note that Coriolis is credited here for the "modern
> scientific meanings" of the concepts of work and
> energy.
>
> A quick look at articles on meteorology and
> oceanography did not reveal anything connected
> with motivations. When was it discovered that
> winds do not flow from regions of high p to
> regions of low p? Was it an empirical discovery or
> a theoretical prediction confirmed by experiments?
> ......................................