Steven Tobias (University of Edinburgh)

From Order to Chaos and Chaos to Order in Fluid Flows

The eleven year solar activity cycle is a remarkable example of regular behaviour emerging from an extremely turbulent system. The jets on Jupiter sit unmoving on a sea of turbulent eddies. Astrophysical phenomena often display organisation on spatial and temporal scales much larger than the turbulent processes that drive them. An outstanding problem of astrophysics (and indeed other branches of nonlinear physics) is the mathematical description of such systems that can capture systematic behaviour emerging from the underlying chaos, given that Direct Numerical Simulation of these objects is simply impossible. These fascinating phenomena introduced and and it is discussed how methods from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics may be developed to give some insight into their behaviour.