Why are fluids so complicated?

It may surprise you to learn that despite the ubiquity of flying machines in the 21th century, it only takes a few repetitions of “how?” to reduce explanations of flight to frustrated handwaving. Things fly (or swim) by pushing around a “fluid”, and fluids have a mischievous way of appearing tame in some settings and intractably unruly in others.

• Navier-Stokes is beautiful and terrible
• The turbulence problem
• Our intuitions work against us
• Crude yet effective empirical models
• Fortunately, computers