Google Search Trends is a fabulous instrument for observing ‘physics-like’ regularities in our communal intercourse. I saw the tool, and thought of phenomena defined over P-worlds, and immediately inferred that there would be search terms, which alone or in conjunction with others, would give away physics-like regularity defined over P-worlds. (This is what Kelso is after too). So I started trying to think of pairs of search terms that would reveal oscillation.

But before I could find any oscillating pairs, I realized that the tool offered several sample pairings. I hadn’t noticed this tutorial level before. Sure enough, they were looking for regularity, for physics-like structures. “Tax forms” vs “Tax examption” shows a nice clear periodic structure.

But then I thought, one might find these in unexpected places. The tax example is transparent. We know the means of propagation. I then did a search for ‘Freud’ vs ‘Jung’. This was very interesting.

Jung is constant, but the time series for Freud appears almost periodic. Not in a simple Fourier sense, but we know enough of time series and dynamics to recognize structure. That pseudo-period is from an interestingly constrained dynamic. What’s going on here?