Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Osborne Reynolds: a turbulent life
- 2 Prandtl and the Göttingen school
- 3 Theodore von Kármán
- 4 G.I. Taylor: the inspiration behind the Cambridge school
- 5 Lewis Fry Richardson
- 6 The Russian school
- 7 Stanley Corrsin
- 8 George Batchelor: the post-war renaissance of research in turbulence
- 9 A.A. Townsend
- 10 Robert H. Kraichnan
- 11 Satish Dhawan
- 12 Philip G. Saffman
- 13 Epilogue: a turbulence timeline
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Osborne Reynolds: a turbulent life
- 2 Prandtl and the Göttingen school
- 3 Theodore von Kármán
- 4 G.I. Taylor: the inspiration behind the Cambridge school
- 5 Lewis Fry Richardson
- 6 The Russian school
- 7 Stanley Corrsin
- 8 George Batchelor: the post-war renaissance of research in turbulence
- 9 A.A. Townsend
- 10 Robert H. Kraichnan
- 11 Satish Dhawan
- 12 Philip G. Saffman
- 13 Epilogue: a turbulence timeline
Summary
I have dream'pt of bloudy turbulence, and this whole night hath nothing seen but shapes and forms …
Shakespeare (1606): Troilus and Cressida, V, iii, 11“Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?” So, according to tradition, cried Henry II, King of England, in the year 1170, even then conveying a hint of present frustration and future trouble. The noun form ‘la turbulenza’ appeared in the Italian writings of that great genius Leonardo da Vinci early in the 16th century, but did not appear in the English language till somewhat later, one of its earliest appearances being in the quotation above from Shakespeare. In his “Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1803”, William Wordsworth wrote metaphorically of the turmoil of battles of long ago: “Yon foaming flood seems motionless as ice; its dizzy turbulence eludes the eye, frozen by distance …”. Perhaps we might speak in similar terms of long-past intellectual battles concerning the phenomenon of turbulence in the scientific context.
Turbulence in fluids, or at least its scientific observation, continued to elude the eye until Osborne Reynolds in 1883 conducted his brilliant ‘flow visualisation’ experimental study “of the circumstances which determine whether the motion of water shall be direct or sinuous, and of the law of resistance in parallel channels”.
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- Information
- A Voyage Through Turbulence , pp. xi - xviPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011