But in practice they don't, because subtle mechanical effects distort the regularity of the oscillations.
ECONOMIST: A luxury watchmaker is putting silicon in its timepieces
But such oscillations in the value of the yuan against the dollar are rare.
We can estimate the period of these oscillations, and this red giant doesn't show that period.
The Holy Grail is isochronism ensuring that the oscillations that push the second hand forward are perfectly regular.
ECONOMIST: A luxury watchmaker is putting silicon in its timepieces
Dr Kehagias and Mr Vezerides, though, set out to find consistent solutions to fuzzy truth equations without chaotic oscillations.
Quartz watches use very high-frequency oscillations of a crystal, which can be tuned with extreme precision to produce regular signals.
ECONOMIST: A luxury watchmaker is putting silicon in its timepieces
The Corot spacecraft detects the oscillations as subtle variations in the light emitted by the star as the surface wobbles.
Such mutations, known as neutrino oscillations, were hinted at three years ago by results from Super-Kamiokande, an older apparatus in Japan.
ECONOMIST: The news that neutrinos have mass is both good and bad
The glaciers could be retreating because of one of the countless natural oscillations in the climate that scientists do not properly understand.
In the Arctic these oscillations occur about every 60 to 70 years.
Finding such oscillations, and therefore mass, in neutrinos is probably the most important discovery made about them since they were first spotted.
Mechanical watches still rely on tiny spirals, invented by the Dutch scientist Christian Huygens in 1675, which, at least theoretically, provide perfectly isochronic oscillations.
ECONOMIST: A luxury watchmaker is putting silicon in its timepieces
It may be that the binary pair stops the oscillations on the red giant by tugging on the star's surface at just the right times.
The best guess for the moment is that the gravitational forces at work between the three stars could serve to dampen the oscillations at HD181068's surface.
That is because the two smaller stars orbit each other in 0.9 days, whereas the expected period of oscillations from the red giant's rumblings is almost exactly half that.
It will also map out in 3D the distribution of galaxy clusters, measuring what are known as baryon acoustic oscillations - literally relics of the sound echoes of the Big Bang.
If there were no correlation between prosperity and distance from the equator, we would expect the green line to be centered at zero with random oscillations due to noise in the data.
But the oscillations provide open season for spoilers on either side, be they Israeli hawks who would rather have Jewish trailer parks in Gaza than peace, or Islamists who still talk of driving the Jews into the sea.
We tightened the bolts on the body in an attempt to subdue its violent oscillations, then downloaded the ReplicatorG software from MakerBot's site, installed it on our system and tethered the printer to our laptop with a USB cord.
ENGADGET: MakerBot Replicator impressions: the dawning of 3D printers in every home?
Similarly, one camp maintains that temperatures are rising dramatically with unspeakable portents, while the other thinks what has happened is entirely a result of undefined internal oscillations in the earth-sun climate system, and that there is virtually no human component to climate change.
FORBES: Global Warming: Hotheads, Flatliners and Lukewarmers, Part One
As historian of science Stanley Jaki spent his life documenting, the pagan world view was one of endless cycles, of oscillations, of rise and fall, golden ages of glory, bronze ages of decline, iron and stone ages of despair, with no genuine permanent progress.
FORBES: Christmas, Kurtosis, Fat Tails, Black Swans and Risk Management
These short-term global fluctuations are associated principally with natural oscillations of tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures summarized in the Nino index in the lower part of the figure. 2012 is nominally the 9th warmest year, but it is indistinguishable in rank with several other years, as shown by the error estimate for comparing nearby years.
FORBES: Yes! We Should Defund The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change
应用推荐