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Dinesh / Photos

MEANDERING AND SPIRALING FLOWS

Theodor Schwenk depicted the currents of natural flows as strands with complicated secondary motions. “They are however not really single stands,” he wrote, “but whole surfaces, interweaving spatially….”
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Dinesh said:

Within currents, he knew, there are secondary currents. Water moving down a meandering river flows, secondarily, around the river’s axis, toward one bank, down to the riverbed, across toward the other bank, up toward the surface, like a particle spirling around a doughnut. The trail of any water particle forms a string twisting around other strings. Schwenk had a topologist’s imagination for such a pattern. “This picture of stands twisted together in a spiral is only accurate with respect to the actual movement. One does often speak of ‘strands’ of water; they are however not really single strands but whole surfaces, interweaving spatially and flowing past each other.”He saw rhythms competing in waves, waves overtaking one another, dividing surfaces, and boundary layers. He saw eddies and vortices and vortex trains, understanding them as the “rolling” of one surface about another. Here he came as close as philosopher could to the physicist’s conception of the dynamics of approaching turbulence. His artistic conviction assumed universality. To Schwenk, vortices meant instability, and instability meant that a flow was fighting an inequality within itself, and the inequality was “archetypal.” The rolling of the eddies, the unfurling of ferns, the creasing of mountain ranges, the hollowing of animal organs all followed one path, as we saw it. It had nothing to do with any particular medium, or any particular kind of difference. The inequalities could be slow and fast, warm and cold, dense and tenuous, salt and fresh, vicsous and fluid, acid and alkaline. At the boundary, life blossoms.

CHAOS
38 hours ago
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