SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
The Skeleton of Water
from the Economist
The connection between an 18th-century savant called Joseph-Louis Lagrange and the problem of landing safely at Hong Kong International Airport may not, at first, be obvious. But there is one.
Hong Kong airport is notorious for rocky and sometimes aborted landings caused by the disturbed air flow from nearby mountains. Though laser technology is deployed alongside its runways to monitor changes in wind speed and thus forewarn pilots, that is often not enough. What is needed is a better understanding of the theory of the winds themselves.
And this is where Lagrange comes in. He was a pioneer of the study of moving fluids (among many other things), but his ideas outran the computational tools of his day. Only now, with supercomputers available to help with the calculations, is it possible to explore those ideas completely. What is emerging is a picture of fluid dynamics more subtle and more complex than anything dreamed of even a decade ago.
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