Lewis Fry Richardson

Lewis Fry Richardson

Lewis Fry Richardson (born October 11, 1881 in Newcastle upon Tyne , † September 30, 1953 in Kilmun , Argyll ) was a British meteorologist and peace researcher . He calculated the first weather forecast . Even if his result deviated far from the actual weather, he founded the method of numerical weather forecast . Some of his findings anticipated results from chaos theory .

As a staunch Quaker and pacifist , he switched to peace research in the 1920s, where he introduced quantitative methods .

Life

Youth and education

Lewis was the youngest of seven children of tannery entrepreneur David Richardson and his wife Catherine, née Fry; the family had been Quakers since the 17th century. After attending elementary school in Newcastle, he went to Bootham School in York from 1894 , which was founded in 1823 for the sons of wealthy Quakers. From 1898 he attended Durham College of Science in Newcastle for two years , where he studied mathematics , physics , chemistry , botany and geology . He completed it with the Associate of Science - comparable to today's A-levels . He then went on to study at King's College , Cambridge without specializing in any particular science. In 1903 he took part I of the tripo in natural sciences.

Apprenticeship and wandering years

Richardson found his first job in 1903 as an assistant in the physics department of the National Physical Laboratory (in Germany comparable to the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt ), where he tested steel alloys for their tensile strength. After only one year he moved to the University College in Aberystwyth as a physics lecturer , where he did not stay long either. In 1906 he went into industry as a chemist for a small peat company , National Peat Industries Ltd. in Newcastle upon Tyne. Richardson and his father made substantial investments in the company. Here he worked on a mathematical problem that became important for his later career: He developed a graphical method for the approximate solution of differential equations in order to calculate the best way to dug the ditches for the drainage of peat bogs. This led to his first scientific publication in 1910 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society , where he applied the method to tension in dams. It is not entirely clear when Richardson left his job in the peat industry, but in 1907 he was briefly assistant to biometrician Karl Pearson , whose eugenic ideals he shared. Then he returned to the National Physical Laboratory , this time to the metrology department, where he stayed for two years.

In 1908 he met his future wife Dorothy, née Garnett. The two married in early 1909. Although Dorothy did not come from a Quaker family, she later became heavily involved in this religious community. Due to a rhesus incompatibility , she suffered numerous miscarriages, so that the marriage remained childless. The couple eventually adopted three strange children. Even in years when Richardson was well paid, they always kept a modest household because the Quakers believe that no money should be wasted on clothing or food.

In 1909, Richardson became director of the chemical and physical laboratory of the Sunbeam Lamp Company in Gateshead . Again he and his father took part in the share capital. The sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912 preoccupied Richardson - like a number of other inventors - so much that he developed a type of sonar technique over water (British Patent No. 9423 of 1912). In December he applied for another patent (No. 11125) in which he described the same technique underwater, i.e. a fully valid sonar. However, he did not find any sponsors for either idea who would have made it possible to exploit the patents.

After three years in Gateshead joined Richardson as a lecturer at the Municipal School of Technology in Manchester , the local administration, which was attended mostly by evening students. From his diaries it appears that he had great problems here in creating discipline among his students. After a few months in 1913 he successfully applied to head the Eskdalemuir Observatory of the British Meteorological Service . Because geomagnetic observations were to be carried out here, the observatory was built in a remote area of ​​Scotland, which accommodated Richardson's need for solitude. The position was expressly linked to the possibility of basic research. Until then, Richardson hadn't studied meteorology; In 1915 he developed the first ideas for a numerical weather forecast here (see below).

As a pacifist in World War I

As a Quaker , Richardson was a staunch pacifist . He got into trouble for the first time when he was asked to develop a method for localizing artillery pieces in Eskdalemuir . In 1916, he resolved other foreseeable conflicts by resigning and driving an ambulance on the Western Front for a Quaker ambulance unit (Friends Ambulance Unit) . This is where the roots of his lifelong preoccupation with war and peace lie.

After the First World War, Richardson applied again to the British Meteorological Service, this time for the position in Benson . This was one of the few observatories from which the higher layers of the air were examined. Richardson began his work here in March 1919, mainly working on improving weather balloons . In the following year, however, he got into a conflict of conscience when the British Meteorological Service was subordinated to the Ministry of Aviation , which was responsible for the Air Force. In the summer of 1920, Richardson resigned for this reason. Sir Nelson Johnson, later director of the UK Meteorological Service, has described the decision as "one of the tragedies in the history of meteorology".

According to his wife, Richardson later destroyed some of his unpublished work when he realized it would have been useful for military researchers at Porton Down to assess the behavior of clouds of poison gas .

A Fellow of the Royal Society working on small colleges

Richardson became a lecturer in physics and math at Westminster Training College . During this time he began a second degree in psychology and mathematics ( B.Sc. in psychology and mathematics in 1925). He skipped the M.Sc. because this academic degree had the reputation of being for sale, and in 1926 he received his doctorate as D.Sc. In the same year he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) - the highest scientific honor awarded in Great Britain. In that year, however, Richardson decided to finally leave physical-meteorological research and devote himself to psychology. Here he worked in his little spare time mainly on questions of psychophysics .

In 1929 he became director of the Technical College in Paisley, Scotland . The board of directors could hardly believe its luck that an FRS was even interested in such a position, which was associated with an immense teaching obligation. After the National Socialists “ seized power ” in Germany, the Richardsons helped a number of German emigrants gain a foothold in Great Britain. Concerned by the political situation, Lewis Richardson increasingly shifted his activities to peace research. In August 1939, a few weeks before the start of the Second World War , he visited Gdansk to get an impression of the situation and traveled back via Berlin.

In February 1940, Richardson resigned from the Technical College to devote himself entirely to peace studies. The board of directors allowed the family to continue living in the director's house; because Richardson was now living on his savings, the family had to be very restrictive.

plant

The first numerical weather forecast

Richardson had first considered the idea of ​​a numerical weather forecast in Eskdalemuir in 1915 . In 1916 he had completed the first draft of his book Weather Prediction by Arithmetical Finite Differences , but wanted to add a practical example to it. The opportunity arose while serving as an ambulance driver on the Western Front. It took him six weeks to calculate the change in weather in two locations over the next six hours. The error was so great that the result was practically unusable, but it is the first attempt at a numerical weather forecast. The book was finally published in 1922 under the title Weather Prediction by Numerical Process and is now considered a classic.

By the time of Richardson it was long known that weather is subject to the laws of physics. Meteorologists, however, made their weather forecasts based on their experience of similar weather patterns, and physical arguments hardly ever played a role. As early as 1904, Vilhelm Bjerknes had requested a numerical weather forecast without being able to show a practicable way. The first problem was that hardly any measurements were obtained from the higher layers of the air. Second, the equations describing physical events in the atmosphere were not available in a form that could be used for routine predictions. Third, the calculations would have required a time in which the forecast would have long been overtaken by reality. Lewis Richardson, however, drew courage from the precision of the nautical yearbooks , in which the position of the stars was precisely predicted, also without their constellations ever being repeated.

The International Meteorological Organization - the predecessor of the World Meteorological Organization - had designated days for meteorological research on which weather balloons should rise in as many places in the world as possible in order to collect data from the upper air layers for at least these days. Richardson used the records for May 20, 1910 at 7:00 am Greenwich Mean Time to make his prediction . For his numerical weather forecast, he covered the weather map of Europe with a checkerboard pattern, with the fields having a side length of about 200 kilometers. He further subdivided the atmosphere above each of these fields into layers with boundaries at heights of 2.0, 4.2, 7.2, and 11.8 kilometers. Almost half of his book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process then consists of a discussion of the necessary physical equations in order to take into account as many physical processes as possible that take place between these cells. Richardson also dealt extensively with the problem of turbulence . With these tools he tried to calculate the changes in air pressure , wind and temperature over the next six hours for two fields in the center of the checkerboard pattern . The result was grotesquely wrong: The air pressure in a field changed by 145 millibars - but the difference between the highest and lowest air pressure that had ever been measured in the British Isles was only 130 millibars. Nevertheless, Richardson showed for the first time in his book how a numerical weather forecast could work in principle.

At the end he presented a vision of how it should be possible with the help of an organization of 64,000 “computers” - at that time the term still meant people - to calculate the global weather so quickly that a weather forecast would actually be possible. The book received a lot of praise when it was published, but almost all of the reviewers also pointed out that the method presented was impractical. For this reason, it was hardly considered in the textbooks of meteorology and was quickly forgotten. It was only the invention of the computer in the sense of a machine that made Richardson's vision practical. Today all weather forecasts are based on the numerical method. In numerical mathematics , the Richardson extrapolation he developed is named after him.

Quantitative peace research

Richardson's contribution to peace research consists in asking himself "Can mathematical language [...] express the behavior of people [...] in war?" Mathematics was already in use in some branches of the social sciences, such as economics , but until then not in peace research. Richardson first developed his ideas in the 1919 article The Mathematical Psychology of War. Since there were no institutions at the time dedicated to peace research, he sent the manuscript to Bertrand Russell , who responded enthusiastically but could not find a publisher either. Richardson eventually had it printed at his own expense.

An arms race theory

In 1935, the events in Germany brought Richardson back to peace research. In a few letters to the journal Nature , he outlined how an arms race could be put into a mathematical form. A similar argument is made today in game theory . Richardson believed that math could provide more precise questions. His book Generalized Foreign Politics - which he later said he should better have called the "theory of the arms race" - was published in June 1939. For the time before the First World War, he was able to show which mathematical function was followed by the armaments expenditure of the later war opponents was. In physics, the explosion of flammable gases was described by a similar function. From this point of view, war was given an inevitability based on natural law. Richardson also pointed out that one could use his theory as a theory of cooperation by simply changing the sign.

Statistical analysis of armed conflicts

So far Richardson had worked more deductively , now he tried to approach the phenomenon of war statistically. He looked for the statistical data for all armed conflicts that he could get hold of, such as the number of victims, warring parties, their languages ​​and religions. In 1941 he had collected enough data to draw the first conclusions. The size of a conflict - measured by the number of victims - therefore followed a power law , as he was able to demonstrate for the period between 1820 and 1929 (he later extended his analysis to 1945). Although he tried very hard, he never found a satisfactory explanation for this fact. However, it struck him on the occasion that the size of human colonies also followed a power law, which he published in a communication to Nature in December 1941. Next, he counted the number of wars that started in a year and found a Poisson distribution , which suggests that the probability of a war breaking out anywhere in the world on any given day is always the same. This discovery justified the working hypothesis that the laws of stochastics can be applied to historical events such as wars.

The analysis by country showed that Great Britain had been most involved in wars, closely followed by France and Russia. If countries with less than one million inhabitants are excluded from the analysis, only Persia, Sweden and Switzerland were never involved in a war during this period (defined as a conflict with more than 3000 fatalities). Richardson suggested that these results could be explained by the number of borders one state shared with other states, with the British Empire naturally having the most borders. Language differences did not seem to play a role in the outbreak of armed conflicts. However, countries whose residents use Chinese characters on both sides appeared to be involved in wars less often than would have been expected, whereas countries with Spanish-speaking residents appeared to be more likely to be involved in wars. Followers of Eastern religions were less common, followers of Christianity and Islam more often involved in wars than would have been expected. Christians fought among themselves more often, while Islam seemed to have a dampening influence here, but this statement was only poorly statistically supported. When nations did trade with one another, they did not easily conflict, but the effect was weaker than Richardson expected.

Practical advice

When asked what practically one could do for peace, Richardson gave the following advice despite many concerns:

1. “When you have the kindness and courage that make saints and heroes, try Gandhi's method.
2. If you find it impossible to love your enemies, at least try to understand them. A good way of empathy is to read the novels and plays that please you.
3. Do not object if your relatives want to marry foreigners. Such bonds can help hold the world together.
4. Do not boycott goods just because they are foreign. Trade is a kind of peacemaker.
5. Develop loyalty to a world government.
6. Always remember that some of your 'defense' preparations, which your nation sees as purely defensive measures, are sure to act like a dangerous threat to other nations to counteract. Nevertheless, there are some preparations that actually serve exclusively the defense, for example air protection measures do not alert unaggressive foreigners.
7. With peacemaking science research going on, keep an eye out for new and better techniques. "

Richardson was unable to find a publisher for his two main works, Arms and Insecurity and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels . In this context, the problem turned out to be that peace research was not yet anchored in an institutional setting and that there was therefore a lack of specialist journals and book series. Since Richardson for his part lacked the means to have his writings printed, he chose the inexpensive, but hardly read microfilm. It was not until years after his death that peace researchers realized what an important thought leader Richardson had been in their field and made sure that his writings were published in book form.

Chaos theory

For his meteorological research, Richardson dealt a lot with the phenomenon of turbulence . His work The supply of energy from and to atmospheric eddies , which he published in 1920 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society , is still cited today. Here he laid the basis for further turbulence research by establishing the current conception of this phenomenon. According to his pioneering interpretation, with a turbulent flow the energy is supplied on a large scale , transported through all scales by the decay of eddies and dissipated in the form of heat (energy cascade) on the smallest scales. The dimensionless number , which indicates the ratio of potential and kinetic energy , was named Richardson's number in his honor .

As part of his peace research, Richardson discovered what is known as the coastline paradox . He had wanted to investigate how the length of the border between two states relates to the probability that these states will be at war with one another. It struck him that the information on the limit length in various sources differed considerably from one another. The results did not appear until posthumously in 1961 in The problem of contiguity . The mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot accidentally discovered this essay when a librarian asked him to look through old books that were about to be thrown away. According to his own admission, Mandelbrot was strongly influenced by Richardson in his work on fractal geometry . In fact, natural coasts do not have a definable length, but their shape must be given as a fractal.

• Increasingly finer measurements of the coastline of Great Britain with ever shorter, straight measuring sections result in an ever increasing coastline that does not converge towards a value
• 

  Straight measuring sections of 200 km in length

• 

  Straight measuring sections of 100 km in length

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  Straight measuring sections of 50 km in length

Related to this is the question that Richardson asked in 1926 in his work Atmospheric diffusion shown on a distance-neighbor graph : “Does the wind have a speed?” He was able to show that the function that describes the position of a molecule in the wind is not a derivative owns. So it makes sense to speak of an average speed, but not of an instantaneous speed of the wind.

Publications

(Selection)

• The supply of energy from and to atmospheric eddies . In: Proceedings of the Royal Society A . Vol. 97, 1920, pp. 354-373.
• Weather Prediction by Numerical Process . Cambridge University Press, London 1922.
• Atmospheric diffusion shown on a distance-neighbor graph . In: Proceedings of the Royal Society A . Vol. 110, 1926, pp. 709-737.
• Generalized Foreign Politics . In: British Journal of Psychology Monograph Supplements . No. 23, 1939.
• N. Rashevsky and E. Trucco (Eds.): Arms and Insecurity: a mathematical study of the causes of war . Boxwood, Pittsburgh and Quadrangle, Chicago 1960 (previously published on microfilm).
• Quincy Wright and CC Lienau (Eds.): Statistics of Deadly Quarrels . Boxwood, Pittsburgh and Quadrangle, Chicago 1960 (previously published on microfilm).
• The problem of contiguity: an appendix of statistics of deadly quarrels . In: General Systems Yearbook . Vol. 6, 1961, pp. 139-187.
• Oliver Ashford, Charnock, Drazin, Hunt, Smoker, Ian Sutherland (Eds.): Collected Papers . 2 volumes, Cambridge University Press 1993. Vol. 1: Meteorology and numerical analysis , Vol. 2: Quantitative psychology and studies of conflict .

various

Since 1977 the European Geophysical Society has awarded the Lewis Fry Richardson Medal for “outstanding, general contributions to non-linear geophysics”.

literature

• Oliver Ashford: Prophet or Professor ?: Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson . Adam Hilger, Bristol 1985, ISBN 0-85274-774-8 .
• Peter Lynch: The Emergence of Numerical Weather Prediction: Richardson's Dream . Cambridge University Press 2006, ISBN 978-0-521-85729-1 .
• Thomas William Körner : The Pleasures of Counting . Cambridge University Press 1996, ISBN 0-521-56823-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christian Endt: cheerful to deadly. The Briton Lewis Fry Richardson first calculated the weather, later he put wars into formulas. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 1, 2016, pp. 38–39.
2. ↑ quoted from Ashford: Prophet - or Professor? ..., p. 106
3. ↑ quoted from Ashford: Prophet - or Professor? ..., p. 60
4. ^ Conflict Management and Peace Science, September 1, 2004 21: 287-296
5. ↑ quoted from Ashford: Prophet - or Professor? ..., p. 230