Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
Most people think classical physics is finished. Newton's laws, a couple of fluid equations, and the whole business was wrapped up before the twentieth century even began. The physics says otherwise. There's a problem sitting in your kitchen sink that every physicist on Earth, working for a hundred and fifty years, has failed to solve.In this video, Feynman confesses the embarrassment at the heart of classical physics — turbulence. From Osborne Reynolds dropping dye into a glass pipe, through the Navier-Stokes equations, Richardson's haunting cascade poem, Prandtl's boundary layer, Kolmogorov's wartime breakthrough, and Lorenz's butterfly — the hunt spans a century and a half of the smartest people alive failing to crack open the behavior of a stream of water. Inspired by Feynman's own admission that turbulence is "the most important unsolved problem of classical physics."Uploaded 26-04-26📚 SOURCES:Feynman, Leighton and Sands — The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume I, Chapter 41: "The Flow of Wet Water" (1964)Osborne Reynolds — "An Experimental Investigation of the Circumstances Which Determine Whether the Motion of Water Shall be Direct or Sinuous," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1883)Lewis Fry Richardson — Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922)Ludwig Prandtl — "Über Flüssigkeitsbewegung bei sehr kleiner Reibung," Third International Congress of Mathematicians, Heidelberg (1904)Andrey Kolmogorov — "The Local Structure of Turbulence in Incompressible Viscous Fluid for Very Large Reynolds Numbers," Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR (1941)Edward Lorenz — "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow," Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences (1963)⏱ CHAPTERS 00:00 — The kitchen tap that physics can't explain 02:40 — Why honey is solved and water isn't 05:25 — Reynolds drops dye in a glass pipe 08:40 — The equation we have but cannot solve 12:10 — Richardson's eerie little poem 15:05 — The boundary layer nobody noticed 17:30 — Kolmogorov's wartime miracle 20:15 — Is it just the butterfly effect? 23:00 — Three reasons turbulence defeats us 26:10 — The unsolved mystery in your sink🎬 CREDITS Script and Research: Feynman Reborn channel team AI Narration and Visuals: Synthetic production Produced by: Feynman Reborn⚠️ WARNING: This video is AI-generated (synthetic voice and visuals). It is an original, fictional lecture inspired by Richard Feynman's teaching style and public ideas, and is not an authentic recording, endorsement, or statement by Richard Feynman or his estate. Any resemblance is for educational/creative purposes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
