Turbulence Trouble
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:
"When I meet God," physicist Werner Heisenberg allegedly once said, "I'm going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he'll have an answer for the first."
Although the quote is almost certainly fictional, it captures the sheer frustration many physicists feel about turbulence: the complex, chaotic, unpredictable flows in fluids.
This phenomenon surrounds us: swirling gases in the atmosphere disrupting our flights; the movement of rivers around rocks; the flow of blood through our arteries. We also see it on cosmic scales, explains quantum physicist Warwick Bowen from the University of Queensland (UQ), from gas flowing in galaxy clusters to the Great Red Spot - a massive cyclone on Jupiter.
"You could fit our planet within this one storm, and it's existed for many hundreds of years - for the whole time that we've been able to observe Jupiter," Bowen says.
[...] And we still don't know why. Turbulence has always been too complex to accurately analyse or even measure. Even after centuries of study, physicists have no general theoretical description of it - it's been described as the last great outstanding problem of classical physics.
Journal Reference:
Guillaume Gauthier, Matthew T. Reeves, Xiaoquan Yu, et al. Giant vortex clusters in a two-dimensional quantum fluid [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aat5718)
Shaun P. Johnstone, Andrew J. Groszek, Philip T. Starkey, et al. Evolution of large-scale flow from turbulence in a two-dimensional superfluid [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aat5793)
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