Theory Colloquium: The Life and Death of Turbulence

Turbulence is the last great unsolved problem of classical physics. But there

is no consensus on what it would mean to actually solve this problem. In this

colloquium, I propose that turbulence is most fruitfully regarded as a problem

in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, and will show that this perspective

explains turbulent drag behavior measured over 80 years, and makes

predictions that have been experimentally tested in 2D turbulent soap films. I

will also explain how this perspective is useful in understanding the laminarturbulence

transition, establishing it as a non-equilibrium phase transition

whose critical behavior has been predicted and tested experimentally. This

work connects transitional turbulence with statistical mechanics and

renormalization group theory, high energy hadron scattering, the statistics of

extreme events, and even population biology.