Next Week Directory Information AstroT Program Water flowing from a slightly open faucet is smooth and steady.
Turbulent flows are common in technology.
While the practical importance of turbulence has long been appreciated, less well appreciated has been its intellectual richness and the central place it occupies in modern physics. Looking into the problem, we are immediately faced with an apparent paradox. This feature, though not fully understood, is now known to bear some connection with the occurrence of dynamical chaos in nonlinear systems. In fact, until the 1960's, turbulence was the paradigm system in which the excitation of many length scales was recognized as centrally important. The powerful notions of scaling and universality, which matured when renormalization group theory was applied to critical phenomena, had already manifested in turbulence a couple of decades earlier.