Compatibility of temporal spectra with Kolmogorov (1941): the Taylor hypothesis. Earlier this year I received an enquiry from Alex Liberzon, who was puzzled by the fact that some people plot temporal frequency spectra with a power law, but he was unable to reconcile the dimensions. This immediately took me back to the 1970s when IContinue reading Compatibility of temporal spectra with Kolmogorov (1941): the Taylor hypothesis.

The concept of universality classes in critical phenomena. The universality of the small scales, which is predicted by the Richardson-Kolmogorov picture, is not always observed in practice; and in the previous post I conjectured that departures from this might be accounted for by differences in the spatial symmetry of the large scale flow. To takeContinue reading The concept of universality classes in critical phenomena.

Macroscopic symmetry and microscopic universality. The concepts of macroscopic and microscopic are often borrowed, in an unacknowledged way, from physics, in order to think about the fundamentals of turbulence. By that, I mean that there is usually no explicit acknowledgement, nor indeed apparent realization, that the ratio of large scales to small scales is manyContinue reading Macroscopic symmetry and microscopic universality.

Can statistical theory help with turbulence modelling? When reading the book by Sagaut and Cambon some years ago, I was struck by their balance between fundamentals and applications [1]. This started me thinking, and it appeared to me that I had become ever more concentrated on fundamentals in recent years. In other words, I seemedContinue reading Can statistical theory help with turbulence modelling?