Quanta Magazine

What Makes the Hardest Equations in Physics So

Difficult?
The Navier-Stokes equations describe simple, everyday phenomena, like water flowing from a
garden hose, yet they provide a million-dollar mathematical challenge.

By Kevin Hartnett

Mike

Physics contains equations that describe everything from the stretching of space-time to the flitter of
photons. Yet only one set of equations is considered so mathematically challenging that it’s been
chosen as one of seven “Millennium Prize Problems” endowed by the Clay Mathematics Institute

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-makes-the-hardest-equations-in-physics-so-difficult-20180116/ January 16, 2018

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with a $1 million reward: the Navier-Stokes equations, which describe how fluids flow.

Last month I wrote a story about an important new result related to those equations. If anything, the
new work suggests that progress on the Millennium Prize will be even harder than expected. Why
are these equations, which describe familiar phenomena such as water flowing through a hose, so
much harder to understand mathematically than, say, Einstein’s field equations, which involve
stupefying objects like black holes?

The answer, I discovered, is turbulence. It’s something we’ve all experienced, whether flying
through choppy air at 30,000 feet or watching a whirlpool gather in the bathtub drain. Yet
familiarity hasn’t bred knowledge: Turbulence is one of the least understood parts of the physical
world.

Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine

An example of a nonturbulent flow is a smooth river: Every part of the river moves in the same
direction at the same speed. A turbulent fluid is the fracturing of that river, so that different parts of
the flow move in different directions at different velocities. Physicists describe the formation of
turbulence as, first, an eddy in a smooth flow, and then the formation of eddies within that eddy, and
yet finer eddies within those eddies — eddies all the way down, so that the fluid becomes broken into
discrete parts, all interacting, each moving its own way.

[abstractions]

Researchers want to understand exactly how a smooth flow breaks down into a turbulent flow and to
model the future shape of a fluid once turbulence has taken over. But the Millennium Prize asks for
something much more modest: proving that solutions will always exist. That is, can the equations
describe any fluid, from any starting conditions, indefinitely far into the future?

“A first step is simply to try to prove that the equations give rise to some solutions,” said Charlie
Fefferman, a mathematician at Princeton University. “That doesn’t give a real understanding of how
fluids behave, but if you don’t have that, you don’t know anything.”

So how do you prove that solutions exist? Well, start by thinking about what could make them not

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exist. The Navier-Stokes equations involve calculating changes in quantities like velocity and
pressure. Mathematicians worry about this kind of scenario: You’re running the equations, and after
some finite amount of time, they tell you a particle in the fluid is moving infinitely fast. That would
be a problem because you can’t calculate the change of an infinite value any more than you can
divide by zero. Mathematicians refer to such scenarios as “blowup,” and in a blowup scenario you’d
say the equations break down and solutions don’t exist.

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Proving that blowup doesn’t happen (and that solutions always exist) is tantamount to proving that
the maximum velocity of any particle within the fluid stays bounded below some finite number. One
of the most important of these quantities is the kinetic energy in the fluid.

When you start modeling a flow using Navier-Stokes, your fluid will have some initial amount of
energy. But in a turbulent flow, that energy can get concentrated. Instead of being distributed
evenly across the river, kinetic energy may gather in arbitrarily small eddies, and particles in those
eddies could (theoretically) be accelerated to infinite velocity.

“As I go to smaller and smaller scales, the kinetic energy becomes less and less useful for controlling
the solution. My solution can do whatever it wants, and I won’t know how to control it,” said Vlad
Vicol, a mathematician at Princeton University and coauthor with Tristan Buckmaster of the new
work.

Mathematicians classify partial differential equations like Navier-Stokes based on the extent to
which they can go haywire at infinitesimally small scales. Navier-Stokes is on the extreme end of the
spectrum. The difficulty of the mathematics of the equation is, in some sense, an exact reflection of
the complexity of the turbulent flows they’re supposed to be able to describe.

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“When you zoom in on a point, from a mathematical point of view you lose information about the
solution,” said Vicol. “But turbulence is meant to describe exactly this — the transfer of kinetic
energy from large to smaller and smaller scales, so it’s exactly asking you to zoom in.”

Created with Wind Tunnel.

Whenever you’re talking about the mathematics of equations from physics, it’s natural to wonder:
Will any of this change the way we think about the physical world? With the Navier-Stokes equations
and the Millennium Prize, the answer is both yes and no. After nearly 200 years of experiments, it’s
clear the equations work: The flows predicted by Navier-Stokes consistently match flows observed in
experiments. If you’re a physicist working in a lab, that correspondence might be enough. But
mathematicians want to know more than that — they want to be able to check if one can follow the
equations all the way through, to see exactly how a flow changes moment by moment (for any initial
configuration of a fluid) and even to pinpoint the onset of turbulence.

“The behavior of fluids provides surprises,” said Fefferman. “The surprises are in principle explained
by the fundamental equations that tell fluids how to move, but getting from the equations that tell
fluids how to move to any description of how fluids actually move is very mysterious.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-makes-the-hardest-equations-in-physics-so-difficult-20180116/ January 16, 2018