Photo Credit: Scientific Frontline |
We experience turbulence every day: a gust of wind, water gushing down a river or mid-flight bumps on an airplane.
Although it may be easy to understand what causes some kinds of turbulence — a felled tree in a river or a bear splashing around for salmon — there is now evidence that a very small disturbance at the start can have dramatic effects later. Instead of a tree, think of a twig — or even the swerving motion of a molecule.
University of California San Diego Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics Nigel Goldenfeld, along with his former student Dmytro Bandak, and Professors Alexei Mailybaev and Gregory Eyink, has shown in theoretical models of turbulence that even molecular motions can create large-scale patterns of randomness over a defined period of time. Their work appears in Physical Review Letters.
The butterfly effect
A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil which later causes a tornado in Texas. Although we may commonly use the phrase to denote the seeming interconnectedness of our own lives, the term “butterfly effect” is sometimes associated with chaos theory. Goldenfeld said their work represents a more extreme version of the butterfly effect, first described by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1969.