Re: Tornadoes - String Theory & Chaos Theory

Posted by DickT on June 26, 2003 at 08:04:34:

In Reply to: Tornadoes - String Theory & Chaos Theory posted by HarrisonShawn on June 26, 2003 at 01:41:24:

HarrisonShawn,

If string theory is accurate then of course strings cause tornados and everything else, but that isn't very useful, since strings are around 10^-18 cm long, that's a decimal point, eighteen zeroes, and a 1. And meteorologists have trouble seeing anything shorter than 10 meters or so.

But chaos definitely does operate in the atmosphere. Both theory and experiment establish that about as well as anything in physics. The "butterfly effect" is real.

Your idea of a cold falling core to a tornado is on target. I believe that's right. And here is my own crank theory of tornados.

You know that the only stable three dimensional air motion is a rotating torus - think of a smoke ring. Other motions exist but quickly break apart, but a torus, topologically, supports a non-zero vector field at all points, and so the sir can move around and around and the motion can last a long time.

So I hypothesize that a tornado is a torus, but a long thin one. The air is descending, with your cold core, inside tha tube then turning to rise on the outside. The descending air has a clockwise turn and the ascending air turns counter clockwise. This does two things. First it satisfies conservation of vorticity (like angular momentum, sort of) because the inside vorticity cancels the outside vorticity. Second it provides the fierce wind shear between the inner and outer layers. I hypothesize that this wind shear, rather than just raw motion, breaks things and leaves the trail of devastation behind a tornado.

Regards,
Dick

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