“Tempest in a teapot: International team of scientists describes swirling natural phenomena“. There’s nothing as quite as fun as making ignorant fun of scientists, is there Anthony? In this post Anthony Watts draws attention to scientists using swirling fluids to model vortices. How crazy is that?

Anthony only refers to a press release and chooses to illustrate his post with a photo of a tea-cup. His commenters continue the downward intellectual journey.

The actual paper in Physical Review Letters, titled Finite-Size Effects Lead to Supercritical Bifurcations in Turbulent Rotating Rayleigh-Bénard Convection, used laboratory cylinders to model circulation. From the press release:

Ahlers and his team discovered a new unexpected phenomenon that was not known before for turbulent flows like this.

The authors showed that their experimental findings are in keeping with a theoretical model similar to the one first developed by Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg and Lev Landau in the theory of superconductivity. That same model is also applicable to other areas of physics such as pattern formation and critical phenomena.

Oh Anthony, so quick to mock knowledge!