Niels Bohr Lecture by professor Nigel Goldenfeld

Title: The life and death of turbulence

Nigel Goldenfeld

Nigel Goldenfeld is Professor in Physics at the University of Illinoi, and the Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology at UIUC, and leads the Biocomplexity Group at the University's Institute for Genomic Biology.

Abstract: How do fluids become turbulent as their flow velocity is increased? During the last ten years, exquisite experiments, numerical simulations and pure theory have uncovered a remarkable series of connections between transitional turbulence, phase transitions and renormalization group theory, high energy hadron scattering, the statistics of extreme events, and even population biology. 

In this talk, I will outline how these developments and strange connections imply that a fluid at the boundary between turbulence and laminar flow behaves precisely like an ecosystem at the verge of extinction, a prediction that is supported by recent experiments.

  • AUD. 3 at HCØ, at 15:15, Wednesday, October 25, 2017

As usual, coffee, tea and cookies will be served in front of the auditorium at 15:00.

 

About Nigel Goldenfeld

Nigel Goldenfeld holds a Swanlund Endowed Chair and is a Center for Advanced Study Professor in Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is the Director of the NASA Astrobiology >Institute for Universal Biology at UIUC, and leads the Biocomplexity Group at the University's Institute for Genomic Biology. Nigel received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (U.K.) in 1982, and for the years 1982-1985 was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara. Nigel has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, a University Scholar of the University of Illinois, a recipient of the Xerox Award for research, and a recipient of the A. Nordsieck award for excellence in graduate teaching. In 1996, Nigel co-founded NumeriX, a company that specializes in high-performance software for the derivatives marketplace.   He serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and Physical Biology. Nigel is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.