In this imperfect world, mathematician Dr Clio Creswell explains why the soliton is the exception. So it causes some surprise when a flawless construction is found in many areas ranging from fibre optics to bioenergetics.
Solitons are waves that interact with each other without losing their height, width or speed.
This is rather an odd concept as we are accustomed to seeing waves either break up into a turbulent mess or die out as they travel. Imagine a still lake. If we drove a boat across it, the trailing white wash would in fact be turbulence resulting from the overload of energy that we were pumping into the water. The amount of energy put into the pebble drop would be small and therefore dissipate. The concept may seem outlandish, but such waves were first scientifically observed by the naval engineer John Scott-Russell in 1834.