Quotes About Turbulence

The Butterfly Effect was the reason. For small pieces of weather—and to a global forecaster, small can mean thunderstorms and blizzards—any prediction deteriorates rapidly. Errors and uncertainties multiply, cascading upward through a chain of turbulent features, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies that only satellites can see.

Mathematicians had to accept the fact that systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom-untrammeled nature expressing itself in a turbulent waterfall or an unpredictable brain-required a phase space of infinite dimensions. But who could handle such a thing? It was a hydra, merciless and uncontrollable, and it was Landau's image for turbulence: infinite modes, infinite degrees of freedom, infinite dimensions.

They had talked about turbulence, but time passed, and even Carruthers was no longer sure where Feigenbaum was headed. "I thought he had quit and found a different problem. Little did I know that this other problem was the same problem. It seems to have been the issue on which many different fields of science were stuck—they were stuck on this aspect of the nonlinear behavior of systems.

The spirit of quarrelsome comradeship which he had observed lately in his rival had not seduced Stephen from his habits of quiet obedience. He mistrusted the turbulence and doubted the sincerity of such comradeship which seemed to him a sorry anticipation of manhood.

We're living in weird times, Streak. I bet forty percent of the country wouldn't mind firing up the ovens as long as the smokestacks are blowing downwind.

The armies of the night are faceless and mindless and the modern equivalent of Visigoths, but when they have a leader, their time in history rolls around again.

Family love: It is firm footing, something to cling to in a frightened world that seems to spin out of control with war, turmoil, terrorism, and uncertainty. It is our highest calling and our greatest nobility.

I still felt like I might hurl, and I thought about how awful that would be in midair.

He was on the verge on insanity with one foot on a banana peel...

Violence and chaos were an ever-present part of the world that I grew up in. And unfortunately, it wasn't just in my family. Sometimes, you'd see, you know, Mom fighting with one of her boyfriends. But a lot of times, you'd see people exploding on each other in a local restaurant or on the street.

Duran is a mythological figure in Latin America. He grew up in a time of turbulence because Panama was basically occupied by the United States. So he felt obliged to fight Americans in the ring. He felt the whole pride of his country and the need for cultural and political emancipation in his hands.

The universe is not harmonious: you know that by looking outside.

I love the storm and fear the calm.

It is within my mind that this quarrel rages, an untidy battle whose frontiers I cannot measure.

I was raised in an environment where chaos was the norm, so I was at my best in chaos.

Normally, when New York catches a cold, London sneezes.

Every now and then, markets behave like schoolchildren. They overreact, they run around like crazy.

Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.

I felt exasperated by her, always turning, always changing, always making me feel as if I was looking for oxygen--how much like fresh air and how much, at the same time, like drowning.

Till gradually he became desperate, lost his understanding, was plunged in a revolt that knew no bounds. Inarticulate, he moved with her at the Marsh in violent, gloomy, wordless passion, almost in hatred of her.

We lived, lulled, on the fault line of chaos. Change could come explosively, and out of nowhere.

The metaphor, though obvious, is too good to resist: Franklin, by nature, liked to find ingenious ways to calm turbulent waters. But during his time as a diplomat in England, this instinct would fail him.

The volcano has not yet gone dormant; the wars of ethnic survival continue to break out. The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, and the Syrian, Kurdish, and Ukrainian conflicts of the following decades demonstrate that the old dynamics are still there.

Well, there's a shitstorm coming, Hayden. And we're going to be right in the middle of it.