Erica Klarreich in Quanta:
In Dr. Seuss’s book “The Cat in the Hat Comes Back,” the Cat makes a stain he can’t clean up, so he calls upon the help of Little Cat A, a smaller, perfect replica of the Cat who has been hiding under the Cat’s hat. Little Cat A then calls forth Little Cat B, an even smaller replica hidden under Little Cat A’s hat. Each cat in turn lifts his hat to reveal a smaller cat who possesses all the energy and good cheer of the original Cat, just crammed into a tinier package. Finally, Little Cat Z, who is too small to see, unleashes a VOOM like a giant explosion of energy, and the stain disappears.
A similar process lies at the heart of a speculative new approach to a problem that has bedeviled mathematicians for more than 150 years: understanding the solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid flow, which physicists use to model ocean currents, weather patterns and other phenomena. These equations are so complex that in most cases, no one knows whether the solution will be smooth and well-behaved, without any sudden shifts of direction or explosions of energy, for instance. And computer models of the solutions run aground, unable to accurately capture the behavior of small eddies.
Now, in a paper posted online on February 3, Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, a winner of the Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor, offers a possible way to break the impasse. He has shown that in an alternative abstract universe closely related to the one described by the Navier-Stokes equations, it is possible for a body of fluid to form a sort of computer, which can build a self-replicating fluid robot that, like the Cat in the Hat, keeps transferring its energy to smaller and smaller copies of itself until the fluid “blows up.” As strange as it sounds, it may be possible, Tao proposes, to construct the same kind of self-replicator in the case of the true Navier-Stokes equations. If so, this fluid computer would settle a question that the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000 dubbed one of the seven most important problems in modern mathematics, and for which it offered a million-dollar prize. Is a fluid governed by the Navier-Stokes equations guaranteed to flow smoothly for all time, the problem asks, or could it eventually hit a “blowup” in which something physically impossible happens, such as a non-zero amount of energy concentrated into a single point in space?
More here.