Unweaving the whirls

Joël Sommeria (1)

1 LEGI - Laboratoire des Écoulements Géophysiques et Industriels [Grenoble]

Turbulence denotes complex fluid motion, as opposed to smooth laminar flows. It evokes agitation, disorder and chaos. The definition of chaos restricts it to dynamic systems of which only the time behaviour is complex — deterministic but sensitive to the initial condition. Turbulence involves spatial as well as temporal complexity, with 'fractal' multi-scale velocity fields. Although physics is successful in grasping many remote and extreme phenomena, it is often of little help with common problems encountered in life. In De rerum natura, Lucretius describes the random motion of dust seen in a ray of sunlight, an early hint at the motion of atoms in a vacuum. Yet nowadays, we know more about atoms than about the turbulent air motion revealed by dust...

Domaines: Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]; Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]

Joël Sommeria. Unweaving the whirls. Nature, 2001, 413 (575), pp.192. ⟨10.1038/35098189⟩. ⟨hal-00260680⟩