The Banana Peel Project

When it comes to cutting edge visual technologies, the San Diego Supercomputer Center always seems to be doing something cool. A group of researchers from UC San Diego recently published a paper that for me is as fascinating as it is incomprehensible: “The Statistics of Supersonic Isothermal Turbulence.” As I’m a huge fan of the SDSC, I’m more than happy to give them some free PR and link to their recent press release with information about the research.

Essentially, researchers generated a turbulent cloud in a box with a resolution of up to 8,589,934,592 individual points and shook it up. The velocity, kinetic energy, and density of each point were recorded at 170 points throughout the simulation. What they got was a detailed simulation of what a cloud moving faster than sound would do under specific conditions.

This is why this stuff is so cool. The statistics are important, the math is great, but for most of us it’s images like this that push our imaginations and inspire us to think differently. Seriously, you could print this out and put this on your wall and never even need to know that it’s a density map of an isothermal supersonic fluid.

I think images like this are interesting for at least a few reasons:

1. They show us how simulations provide us with control over real phenomena. It seems to me that the relationship between simulation and control is a lot like the relationship between experience and experiment.
2. They provide visual models for otherwise unseen phenomena and as a result encourage new theories and innovations.
3. They utterly contradict the idea that science and art are unrelated.