Construct · 3 fields · 4 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, three constructs Nearest construct by meaninglosscompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to damping is loss.
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The steady draining of a vibrating system's energy into heat, so that a swing, a spring, or a bridge that is set moving and left alone dies down instead of ringing forever: friction and viscous drag do irreversible work, and the motion decays. Rayleigh's 1877 The Theory of Sound set this out with a dissipation function that measures the rate at which mechanical energy is lost, and engineers now grade a system by a damping ratio that sorts it into underdamped, critically damped, or overdamped behaviour. The referent here is real energy leaving the system as warmth and never coming back, which sets it apart from a plasma wave that fades with no heat at all, and from a seedling disease that has nothing to do with vibration.[1]
The fading of a wave in a hot, thin plasma even when its particles never collide, so nothing rubs and no heat is produced. Landau's 1946 paper On the vibrations of the electronic plasma showed that particles moving at nearly the wave's speed exchange energy with it, and because slightly slower particles outnumber slightly faster ones, the wave gives up energy on balance and its amplitude drops. As Ryutov's 1999 review stresses, the process is reversible and involves no dissipation: the wave energy is carried off in an ever finer winding of the particle velocities rather than turned to warmth, and a later disturbance can even unwind it as an echo. That makes this damping the strange twin of the mechanical kind, since the curve looks the same while the mechanism, collisionless and reversible, is its opposite, and it is unrelated to any disease of plants.[2][3]
The disease in which young seedlings rot at or below the soil line and topple over soon after they sprout, or fail to come up at all, driven by soil fungi and water moulds such as Pythium, Rhizoctonia, and Fusarium that thrive in cold, wet, crowded ground. Lamichhane and colleagues' 2017 review Integrated management of damping-off diseases gathered the causes and controls of this loss, one of the oldest recognised problems in raising plants from seed. The word here descends from the old use of damp for moisture and for stifling, and names a living blight of nurseries and fields, so it has no connection to a fading vibration or a plasma wave and collides with them only in spelling.[4]
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