Turbulence
Posted on Tuesday, April 17 @ 14:21:49 CEST by Adam
I hung out with some friends while I was in Paris (post to come) and they made this movie of some flower petals swirling in the breeze.
Often I get asked what I do for a living, and it can be difficult to explain to non technical people. One of the things I do is try to imitate such effects on a computer. There are many commercial reasons for doing this, but one simple reason is that in general you can only tell a computer to do something after you understand how it works yourself, so it is a perfect test of your understanding of the world.
The world -- including this example of fluid dynamics -- interests me because what you see is simple and complex at the same time, which is a way of saying that it is beautiful. And beyond just observing it, I try to understand it -- understand how complexity -- chaos -- can emerge from simple rules.
