In his classic 1971 text, Peter Bradshaw refers to turbulence as “the most common, the most important and the most complicated kind of fluid motion.”1 Now, more than 40 years later, the claim remains easily justifiable. Turbulence is likely familiar to anyone who has flown on an airplane or watched water rush past a rock in a stream. It emerges in any number of natural and manmade settings, from atmospheric and oceanic currents to flows in pipelines and heat exchangers. It influences weather, pollution levels, and climate change and figures into the design of propulsion devices, wind turbines, clean rooms, artificial hearts, and irrigation systems.
The complexity of turbulence is evidenced by the fact that after more than a century of concerted research effort, many of its seemingly simple questions remain unanswered. It has been said, in fact—in a quote variously ascribed to Arnold Sommerfeld, Albert Einstein, and Richard...
