The ocean inspires science in much the same way it inspires art—like Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” or “Moby Dick” or “Surfin’ USA”—which is to say in no small or uncertain way. That’s how UPenn School of Arts & Sciences Assistant Professor and researcher of fluid mechanics, Arnold Mathijssen sees it, in any case. “For example,” he says in a Penn Today press release, “when Isaac Newton published the Principia in 1687, he used the rise and fall of the ocean as evidence that a single force governed both falling objects on Earth and bodies in space. The tides, Newton showed, are the moon and the sun pulling on the water by gravity.” Indeed, most of us accept all that by now, but that a luminary such as Newton would be inspired to figure all that out simply by staring and musing at the sea offers a certain romance to science, and the sea, does it not?…