What Makes the Hardest Equations in Physics So Difficult? - Facts So Romantic
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Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Familiarity hasn’t bred knowledge: Turbulence is one of the least understood parts of the physical world.Photograph by Mike / FlickrPhysics 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 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 (...)