A sneeze. Ocean currents. Smoke. What do these have in common? They're instances of turbulence: unpredictable, chaotic, ...

Turbulence is not merely chaotic; rather, it consists of an evolving hierarchy of interacting vortices, which may organize into large-scale structures or produce coherent flow patterns over time.

This pattern is important to understand because it shows how the turbulent and the calm, otherwise known as "laminar flow," compete with each other to determine its final state, according to a ...

An example of why turbulence is said to be an unsolved problem is that we can’t generally predict the speed at which an orderly, non-turbulent (“laminar”) flow will make the transition to a ...

The flow patterns never repeat themselves. To convince yourself of this watch a smoke stack for a few minutes. Fluid flow that is slow tends to be laminar. As it speeds up a transition occurs and it ...

The dappled starlight and swirling clouds of Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” are thought to reflect the artist’s tumultuous state of mind when he painted the work in 1889.

The dappled starlight and swirling clouds of Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” are thought to reflect the artist’s tumultuous state of mind when he painted the work in 1889.