Turbulence remains one of the most persistent and unresolved problems in classical physics. Even after decades of progress in numerical simulation and statistical theory, we still lack a clear mechanistic explanation for how energy moves across scales, why coherent structures coexist with disorder, and how intermittency emerges so universally. Kolmogorov’s 1941 theory captures the statistical scaling of the inertial range, but it does not identify the internal degrees of freedom responsible for the cascade itself.
Jason Nahmabin (2026) studied this question.