I love that quote. I should buy that book just as an artifact to make me happy every time I see it. The absolute pinnacle of self-aware humor.

Wasn't there an experiment with lasers and reversing cause and effect?

I read this in TechnologyConnections voice.

Imo turbulence is "unsolved" in the same way the 3-Body problem is unsolved. It's chaotic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

We have a mathematical model, Navier-Stokes (NS), that seems to describe motion of fluids well. In practice NS and related approximation models with simpler numerical solutions can be used to derive useful results. In that sense we can simulate turbulence for some sets of conditions and get useful approximations out. In general it’s still an open problem if NS has, given an initial velocity field, a solution that is globally defined and smooth. Practically this means we don’t know one way or the other if NS has initial conditions under which the velocity or pressure fields of the solution tend to infinity in finite time. This is the unsolved Navier-Stokes problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_existence_and_smoothness

Maybe the turbulence was inside us all along / the friends we made along the way.

Weinersmith, really? Poor bastard

Thanks, though, that's really helpful! I didn't believe you until I looked it up :)

"This is a model and description of how the world seems to work"