| Contents |
| In 1883, Reynolds published his classical work on the experimental
study of the stability of shear show and transition to turbulence.
Since then the issue of the critical
Reynolds number at which laminar flows become unstable has been
studied by numerous people, includig Sommerfeld, Heisenberg,
C. C. Lin, Orazag, and more recently, Trefethen, Hof, Barkley, Eckhardt,
etc. Despite this great deal of effort, the theoretical question
as to how the critical Reynolds number should be determined still
remains open. In this talk, we present an approach using ideas drawn from
statistical physics and large deviation theory.
We also discuss applications of this theoretical framework to a few examples of
other non-equilibrium systems. |
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