Radio wave as a morphogenetic field

The MeriKotka Founder

A bone-chilling cold snap below minus 43 degrees Celsius kept Aaranya Susipetonen away from her field site near the Quiet Lake batholith. Celsius is in bold because Canada switched from the Imperial to the Metric system only a few months ago on April 01, 1975. Aaranya is keeping track of both the systems during her January 1976 field trip, as she is still studying the Yukon-Tanana terrane for clues.

Prof. Scamander is back at the Frazden school in Lapland, so Aaranya has no valid reason to ignore the textbook she is commissioned to write. It is time to start thinking about the first SARtastic beast and the first paper that she had read when she started her research on radar imaging. This beast belongs to the MeriKotka house, so the episode starts with a brief mention of DJ Bohm who is its founder.

A SARtastic Beast

Aaranya reads some paragraphs from a 1999 paper on a near-field 3-D synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging algorithm. As she is thinking aloud about this crude draft, you will hear her talk about how this paper led her down a certain path and led her to other research papers.

You will also hear how the founder of the MeriKotka house inspired Aaranya over the years and how ⁠a dialogue⁠ between DJ Bohm and a ⁠biologist helped Aaranya finally understand what the 1975 song (Kuinka voit väittää) was telling her about the formative field.

Aaranya is referring to the following papers:

• Historical roots of gauge invariance (2001)
• 3-D radar imaging using range migration techniques (1999)
• Deep learning and quantum annealing methods in synthetic aperture radar (2021)⁠⁠
• ⁠Overcoming polar-format issues in synthetic aperture radar multichannel autofocus (2015-2016)⁠⁠
• A review of synthetic-aperture radar image formation algorithms and implementations: A computational perspective (2022)

Podcast Note

Note: As this podcast is a work of fiction, everything herein is imaginary with some dangling facts. You will hear a few seconds of the MeriKotka house song (Kaikista maailman maista by Petri Laaksonen) because this SARtastic beast belongs to MeriKotka. And as always, Aaranya will croak.

Cover Image

Image of a white-bellied sea eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster) by Bishnu Sarangi from Pixabay. Meri means Sea in Finnish and Kotka means Eagle. Each house of the Frazden school is named after its patronus, and the white-bellied sea eagle is the patronus of this house.

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