The Physics of Turbulence

Here's a list of some Physics professors working in the areas of turbulence / hydrodynamics / fluid dynamics in two top universities in the US and two in the UK:

Dr. Miklos Porkolab and Dr. Mark Vogelsberger (MIT)

Dr. Edgar Knobloch and Dr. Joel Fajans (UC Berkeley)

Dr. Nikos Nikiforakis (University of Cambridge)

Dr. Peter Read and Dr. Andrew Wells (University of Oxford).

Go back a bit in history: Werner Heisenberg's PhD thesis was titled "On the Stability and Turbulence of Liquid Currents".

Dr. Richard Feynman guided a Physics PhD student who wanted to study how waves form in oceans and also worked on turbulence theory himself.

Yet we see a proliferation of physics departments today that do not take these subjects seriously! I've even met Physicists who say things like "Well, fluid mechanics, hydrodynamic stability, turbulence, etc. are not really physics subjects."

This isn't just laughable - its worse: this is academic shortsightedness of ghastly proportions :)! Liquids and Gases are two of the four phases of physical matter, thus making fluids half the universe we live in :). Include magnetohydrodynamics and plasma (the fourth state of matter) enter the picture too :). Our entire life is immersed in fluids - the air flowing into our lungs and out as we breathe, the blood flowing through our entire body as the heart pumps, atmospheric flows that govern the weather, the clear air turbulence that airplane pilots try to avoid so earnestly, the list can go on ... Not to mention, of course, that 71 % of Earth is water!

Fluid mechanics is inseparable from our physical existence. And it's not really physics. The sheer audacity and dim-wittedness of such a statement!

And while the laminar (stable) state of flows is interesting in itself, consider the unstable (turbulent) state for a moment:

Without a complete understanding of the stability (linear as well as nonlinear) and fully turbulent states of fluid flows, there is simply no possibility of understanding even our own atmosphere, leave alone the evolution and movement of galaxies, planet interiors, the sun and other stars, etc.

We need to get academically rigorous and start keeping things real again! We are too "buzzy" today, too obsessed with buzzwords and fashion!

PS: Landau and Lifshitz's "The Course on Theoretical Physics", a ten volume set, has an entire volume (Volume 6) dedicated to Fluid Mechanics. Consider that. Consider that.