It is trite to regard turbulence as the last unsolved problem in classical physics and to cite many books and authorities to justify the opinion. It is likewise a cliché to list great physicists and mathematicians, such as Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman, and Andrei Kolmogorov, who “failed” to solve the problem despite much effort. Horace Lamb and others have been credited with wishing to seek heavenly wisdom on the subject when they arrived in heaven. With such lists and stories, youngsters are cautioned, directly and indirectly, that turbulence is beyond reasonable grasp.
One need not apologize for or despair over the difficulty of turbulence. For one thing, turbulence has contributed several ideas and tools of lasting value to neighboring areas of physics. A sampling includes negative temperature, anomalous diffusion, and the concept of power-law scaling in many-body problems. The powerful notions of scale invariance and universality were first proposed in...
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