I was tempted to put this directly into pseudoscience but I think it may just pass (or may even be a phenomenon of which I am totally ignorant). If you have even driven down a dry dirt road you may have experienced something called washboard road. It's the formation of a regular pattern of ripples that form on the surface of the road. Essentially, there are three factors involved: a constant downward force (gravity), motion and a malleable material. The tyre (or paddle) pushes and stomps the dirt from a disordered, chaotic patterns of lumps and bumps into a regular pattern of waves that destroys your shock absorbers as it builds up. You would expect the tyres to flatten out the road into an efficient smooth surface but it would seem that by adding this energy to this system the most stable arrangement is regular and repeating waves. Here is a short paper that explains it pretty well: http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~nonlin/preprints/BTMM09.pdf and a little clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GduGTDWbc_M OK, so pretty normal so far; here is the cannon fodder or as I like to call it, a question. I'm trying to imagine this effect being applied to energy or the elementary particles of nature, or at least the smallest substance on which gravity has an affect. I'm thinking oscillations or resonance which may manifest in far more complicated structures such as string theory worldsheets etc but formed by the same washboard effect. If such a simple event, such as tyres rolling down a road, can produce regular wave patterns in dirt are there any similarly formed structures amongst the fundamental makeup of our universe (or at least an occurrence of chaos being ordered in this way)? I am savvy to simple wave formations such as sound waves but I think this is something subtly different. I have some speculations but I'll leave it at that for now.
I don't think there are such structures in quantum mechanics. However I guess some kind of phenomenon or scientific effect like this could possibly exist in vacuum fluctuations. But its just speculation.
