Studying impossible systems with analogues
physicsworld.com
physicsworld.com
Rogue waves, made popular by their often ship-sinking behavior out at sea, are extremely rare and therefore difficult to study by waiting around for them to happen. Here, researchers inject noise into an otherwise stable laser system (recall that light is also a wave) that has some small nonlinear properties and rely on the high rate at which we can generate laser pules to observe rogue waves at a high enough volume to study their properties.
Dynamical Analogies, by Harry Olson: https://archive.org/details/DynamicalAnalogies
It's in the public domain. I love it so much I had it printed and bound.
The book is based on lectures given in the 1930s & the math is nothing like what we use now. I can't follow a lot of it. But the tables are intuitive & the explanations are very clear.
The math might be unusual for a CS graduate, but my impression is that many CS graduates seem unjustifiably afraid of continuous math, probably from a lack of familiarity. Often the continuous case is easier, so being familiar with both approaches can be useful.