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Register here: https://bit.ly/kwk_Jan2026Title: When Fluids Misbehave
Pour milk into tea, watch smoke rise from a candle, or look at clouds in the sky: Very quickly, smooth motion turns into a restless dance of swirls and eddies. This is the simplest caricature of turbulence, one of the most common yet least understood phenomena in nature. Turbulence is why predicting the weather is hard, why airplanes burn extra fuel, and why mixing in fluids is so efficient. Although it looks completely chaotic, turbulence hides remarkable patterns that scientists are still trying to uncover. In this talk, I will give an intuitive introduction to turbulent flows, showing how large whirls break into smaller and smaller ones in a cascade of energy. We will also glimpse some famous open mysteries: How fluids continue to lose energy even when friction vanishes (the dissipative anomaly), and why turbulence refuses to obey simple scaling rules (multiscaling). Turbulence reminds us that nature can be wild, beautiful, and deeply mysterious, even in everyday flows.
About the Speaker:
Samriddhi Sankar Ray is an Associate Professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (ICTS-TIFR) in Bangalore, India.
He obtained his PhD in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, followed by postdoctoral work at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Nice. He joined ICTS–TIFR in 2013, where he studies turbulence and complex fluid flows across Reynolds numbers, focusing on universal features and open problems in nonequilibrium fluid dynamics, at the interface of statistical physics and applied mathematics.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium Bangalore, 30 Raj Bhawan Road, High Grounds, Sampangi Rama Nagar, Bengaluru 560001, India, Bangalore
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