Summary of the Symposium

Abstract

I would like to share with you some things that I heard at this meeting, and I heard a great deal. Maybe you can correct me if you did not hear them, that might be useful. We started off talking about intuition and I found this to be a delightful statement and it really sets a tone for the whole meeting, and I think there has been a lot of progress on that. What surprised me most was that I was unaware of the extent of the data and the difference of opinions with respect to what goes on in the cascade-process with all the small scales, etc. I didn’t realize how widely shared some of these speculations were. The subject which I noted to be of considerable interest was the difference in views on spectral representations. As I understood what was said earlier in the meeting was that the concept of infinite Reynolds number as a limit may not anymore be a meaningful concept, but the viscosity may act at all scales. I think that is what this graph means, which we saw in a couple of the early papers. Now along comes Keith Moffat with a reminder that spiral structures can also produce something which looks pretty similar to the fractal structure. Does it take a multifractal set of scales, a wide range of scales to produce turbulence or can you do it with a single structure and a single scale? These are the different set of views.