Can Gold Ever Not Be Gold?

A post about sine waves, daylight hours, and the origin of the universe

Title card created by the author

There’s nothing like sitting on your front porch and enjoying a cool summer day… while also trying to listen to the sine wave in my own humming voice.

Yeah, I’m a weird dude! But here I am, re-reading mathematician Steven Strogatz’s lovely book, The Joy of x, and thinking about just how funky the universe is. If you don’t know what a sine (sinusoidal) wave is, this is what one looks like:

Sine and cosine wave (Source)

For a practical example, consider the number of daylight hours in one day. Because days grow longer and shorter relative to our position from the sun, in which we lovingly refer to as seasons, we get more daylight in summer months and less in winter months. When plotted on a graph, this produces a very gentle sine wave. Although much more subtle than the diagram above, the chart below displays sine waves for daylight hours at different altitudes. And humanity has experienced almost alarming consistency in terms of the seasons being the same year after year.