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The New York Times published an article in its magazine about one of the greatest mathematicians living today, Terry Tao. The first paragraph should whet one's appetite for the rest of the article:
This April, as undergraduates strolled along the street outside his modest office on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mathematician Terence Tao mused about the possibility that water could spontaneously explode. A widely used set of equations describes the behavior of fluids like water, but there seems to be nothing in those equations, he told me, that prevents a wayward eddy from suddenly turning in on itself, tightening into an angry gyre, until the density of the energy at its core becomes infinite: a catastrophic ‘‘singularity.’’ Someone tossing a penny into the fountain by the faculty center or skipping a stone at the Santa Monica beach could apparently set off a chain reaction that would take out Southern California.
There are some people who are just too smart, and this guy is one of them.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday July 25 2015, @09:41PM
I guess we must have just been lucky so far. I mean, if any random vortice has nothing stopping it from generating a singularity, we have been really lucky so far. Or, my g-d! Perhaps not?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @10:04PM
The density of the energy may become infinite, but the total energy cannot increase - conservation of energy. So the spectacular explosion would contain all the energy of a tiny eddy. As the diameter of the gyre decreases, the velocity of the water must increase - conservation of angular momentum.
However:
1 - as the energy density increases, so will the temperature. As the temperature increases, heat gets released to the surroundings, dissipating energy.
2 - as the speed increases, it reaches the speed of sound in water, requiring an increase in energy to move faster.
Never use an equation in isolation.
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Sunday July 26 2015, @04:24PM
I think you may have meant arbitrarily large, rather than infinite. Conservation of energy is more about local conservation, that "energy" cannot teleport, and the only way for energy to become infinite would be for it to teleport from an infinite number of locations.
(Score: 4, Funny) by frojack on Saturday July 25 2015, @10:11PM
And all those screw propellers we've been putting on ships! We've been living on the edge.
Just goes to show you that even things that have NEVER happened are the fault of mankind.
This is why we keep the Mathematicians safely ensconced in universities where they can't do much damage.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2015, @03:43AM
now if only we could convince the climate change fearmongers of this
not likely
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday July 26 2015, @07:55PM
I thought the largest employer of mathematicians was the NSA?
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