Description

From Chapter 1: The understanding of turbulent behavior in flowing fluids is one of the most intriguing, frustrating— and important—problems in all of classical physics. The problem of turbulence has been studied by many of the greatest physicists and engineers of the 19th and 20th Centuries, and yet we do not understand in complete detail how or why turbulence occurs, nor can we predict turbulent behavior with any degree of reliability, even in very simple (from an engineering perspective) flow situations. Thus, study of turbulence is motivated both by its inherent intellectual challenge and by the practical utility of a thorough understanding of its nature.