3 ms·
> "The answer, I discovered, is turbulence. It’s something we’ve all experienced, whether flying through choppy air at 30,000 feet or watching a whirlpool gathe
by randomdrake 9y ago
> "The answer, I discovered, is turbulence. It’s something we’ve all experienced, whether flying through choppy air at 30,000 feet or watching a whirlpool gather in the bathtub drain. Yet familiarity hasn’t bred knowledge: Turbulence is one of the least understood parts of the physical world."
This immediately made me think of "roughness" and Benoit Mandelbrot.
> “When you zoom in on a point, from a mathematical point of view you lose information about the solution,” said Vicol. “But turbulence is meant to describe exactly this — the transfer of kinetic energy from large to smaller and smaller scales, so it’s exactly asking you to zoom in.”
You can explore the Mandelbrot set in similar fashions. There are many tools online to do so. The more you zoom in, the more you get completely lost from what the original image looks like.
If this kind of stuff interests you, his TED talk is among my favorites and can be found here:
https://www.ted.com/talks/benoit_mandelbrot_fractals_the_art_of_roughness https://www.ted.com/talks/benoit_mandelbrot_fractals_the_art...
- catbird 9y agoThank you for linking the TED talk. I did not know that Mandelbrot had also applied his fractal analysis to financial data.