ABSTRACT
People have been fascinated by fluid flows and turbulence at least since such time as some neolithic ancestor, with a noisy wind in her ears may have marvelled before the spectacle of immense ripples rolling across a field of grass. I experienced just the same at Celtic Field in Clifton Down one afternoon during the meeting reported in this book. On both scales of time and space-acoustic noise and eddies of landscape proportions-an invisible continuum conserves momentum and energy under simple rules, but the outcome seems lawless. Fluid flow was also my own favorite mystery as an undergraduate engineer, in part due to its resemblance to physiological processes: turbulent flows seem almost ‘alive’. After a century of scientific study and half that duration of mathematical and computational modelling, I think it is still safe to guess that students of such spatio-temporal dynamics have most of their historic adventures yet before them. This chapter relates one such adventure as a good prospect for the discovery of unforeseen principles, in this case again in a transparent three-dimensional continuum, but with rotating chemical and electrical patterns replacing momentum eddies, and with a unique pattern time scale rather than one that cascades from seconds to milliseconds.
