ADDRESS OF WELCOME 



F. J. Weyl 



Deputy and Chief Scientist 



Office of Naval Research 



Washington, D.C. 



Your Royal Highness, Professor Lunde, fellow wayfarers on the road to 

 Bergen: It is my pleasure in the name of the Norwegian Ship Model Experiment 

 Tank and the United States Office of Naval Research to bid you welcome at this 

 our goal. We are most appreciative for this opportunity of descending, maybe 

 a bit disorganized but full of friendliness, upon your country; and we look for- 

 ward to discovering more of its social fabric, its forests and fjords. Perhaps 

 we are, inadvertently, redressing in these latter days a long term balance by the 

 confusion we may cause in your hostelries and shops in return for that caused 

 by visits which were made from these parts to very nearly the whole of the here- 

 represented world during the centuries of Norway's birth. Most deeply grateful 

 we are to the staff of Skipsmodelltanken, its distinguished director, Professor 

 Lunde, and his associates, for having taken on the task of being host for the 

 Symposium, and thus to look after our well-being, both temporal and spiritual, 

 during our days in Bergen. We shall express our thanks in work reported and 

 new endeavors initiated, in legends told and traditions started. 



The ocean is a strange and wondrous thing, not only to the historian who 

 traces the role which it has played in the fates of men and people, but no less to 

 the scientist. Let us first give a look at its geometry. Its characteristic hori- 

 zontal dimension exceeds its depth by three orders of magnitude. Bounded by 

 the atmosphere above, it presents a mightily agitated surface. Massive currents 

 and huge eddies characterize the motion of the basins, driven by gravity and the 

 rotation of the earth. Unexplored heat transfer phenomena across its bottom 

 vitally influence the energy balance. In short, it is all boundary and yet presents 

 itself so unbounded. 



To a technology peculiarly matched to life in the atmosphere where the sig- 

 nal speed is that of light and even the fastest form of locomotion constitutes but 

 one thousandth of one percent of this speed, the ocean again presents a radically 

 different concert of parameters. Opaque to electromagnetic radiation, the char- 

 acteristic mode of signal transmission is acoustic. Complicated reflection and 

 refraction phenomena are caused by the layer structure, multipath phenomena 

 obscure reception, and scattering is a fact of life rather than being encountered 

 at the very fringe of usefulness of the information carrier. Moreover, measured 

 in terms of signal speed, locomotion is now two orders of magnitude faster than 

 in our wonted atmospheric medium. 



Lastly, let me point out the tremendous range of time scales encountered in 

 the dynamic behavior of the oceans. The waves and wave patterns on the surface 



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