Comment
Central: Six momentous anniversaries this fortnight
Turbulence is a familiar fact of life for air travellers. But in reality, the
pockets that we experience in flight are an extreme example of something
going on around us constantly. Meteorologically, turbulence is the
non-linear movement of water and air in the atmosphere. Driven by the
effects of sunlight and wind, it is the force that moves the weather around.
Associated both with patterns and with uncertainty, turbulence is also the
operational force in many other areas of life. When we move in a crowd in a
city, we are subject to turbulence. When a warm ocean current threatens the
melting of icebergs, turbulence is part of the equation. Tsunamis in Sri
Lanka, the inundation of towns on the Severn, the erosion of coastlines in
East Anglia - all these processes involve a measure of turbulence. So, as we
now know all too well, does economics.
In entitling his memoir The Age of Turbulence, the former chairman of the
Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, was recognising that connection.
Greenspan's book was published in September 2007. It was in mid-July of that
year, while many people were on holiday, that the first signs of the credit
crunch emerged. What it actually means to be in a turbulent economy is
something that ordinary people, as well as politicians and economists, are
still grappling with.
As a species, we are more comfortable with the notion of volatility as a
temporary rupture in a mainly stable context than with the idea that
turbulence might be the norm. Although we praise some individuals as
“dynamic”, the true appreciation of life itself as dynamic is a quality
rarely found. Requiring reality to organise itself intelligibly means
closing down the field of possibility, something that turbulence is always
seeking to open up.
The idea of a turbulent norm is not so paradoxical as it might seem. To
understand why this should be so, you have to go back to the linguistic
origins of turbulence. Derived from the Latin words for a crowd or
disorderly motion (turba) and for a whirlwind or spinning top (turbo),
turbulence was double-natured from the start. It expresses both shape
(patterns in the crowd, or the temporary stability of the spinning top) and
lack of shape (commotion in a crowd, or the moment when the spinning top
begins to wobble). In both cases, factors of time and space are crucial.
As a word, turbulence came into general usage in English in the late 16th and
early 17th century, mostly to describe political agitation, but also stormy
weather. It appears in several Shakespeare plays. People will also be
familiar with Henry II's much earlier (and perhaps apocryphal) cry of
frustration about Thomas à Becket: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent
priest?” But one shouldn't just think of turbulence as troublesome. In
systems theory, turbulence is what happens when organisation breaks down at
the edges of systems, enabling new types of system to be born.
We seem to be going through such a period of transition now. I suppose I might
have had some vague intuition of this when, about seven years ago, I began a
novel about the D-Day weather forecast, entitled Turbulence. But the main
reason I wrote the book was a family connection which led to a writer's
exciting encounter with hard science.
Even in that arena, turbulence contains many mysteries. It has been described
as “one of the last great problems in classical physics”. Albert Einstein is
said to have joked: “Before I die, I hope someone will clarify quantum
physics for me. After I die, I hope God will explain turbulence to me.”
One aspect of the mystery is turbulence's partial predictability, the way it
sometimes seems to resolve into a pattern, sometimes not. This intermittency
is innate, but also concerned with the position of the observer: turbulence
changes according to the period over which it is observed, and also
according to the vantage point from which observation takes place.
With turbulence, the time-space meter is always ticking, bringing new weather,
new information that alters the relationship between a given pattern and a
given context. New information, yes, but what does it mean? And now already
both givens are gone, irretrievably mixed with each other, busy making new
weather elsewhere.
It was my father-in-law, Julian Hunt, who introduced me to this evanescent
world of fleeting patterns. Walking on Hampstead Heath in London or across
the rolling hills of north Devon, he would explain aspects of weather which
I had no doubt seen before but not fully absorbed, still less understood.
His observations were unusually acute, touching on practice as well as
theory. In addition to having been an academic in this field (at Cambridge,
University College London and other institutions abroad), Hunt was also the
director of the Meteorological Office.
Active in politics in local government and the House of Lords as well as in
science, he is someone who for many years has striven to overcome the split
between science and arts identified by C.P.Snow as “the two cultures”.
Snow's novel The Search is a favourite title of my father-in-law's, best
describing, as he once put it to me, “what it is actually like to work in a
lab, at a bench”.
Slowly the idea grew that I might try to convey some of all this in a novel of
my own. In The Last King of Scotland and other books, I had written mainly
about the colonial and post-colonial situation in Africa. Now I was casting
around for a new subject, and suddenly here one was. A novel of the
atmosphere.
I began to look at examples of the scientific novel. These included such
titles as Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith and the tradition of scientific
romance associated with Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and others. I also became
aware of the prevalence of the turbulence's characteristic shape - the
spiral or whorl - in literary history. It's there in Dante, Poe and
Mallarmé. It's there in Yeats's gyre and Conrad's Typhoon.
I realised I had set myself a large task, even with the help of a guru. It was
going to be difficult to dramatise the hypothetical nature of the scientific
project, and hard to avoid the caricature of the mad scientist. Almost from
Frankenstein on, the depiction of scientists in fiction has tended to be
driven by public fear of science rather than what scientists actually do.
I certainly didn't expect my subject matter as well as my theme to emerge
directly from my in-laws. In 1909, Hunt's great-aunt married a man who was
to have a profound effect on the history of science. Lewis Fry Richardson
(1881-1953) worked in many fields, but he is recognised primarily for his
theories of turbulence and his working out of the numerical system on which
all modern weather forecasting depends.
I feel privileged to have been introduced to him, even if by proxy. Hunt spent
school holidays with Richardson as a young boy. From him and other sources,
I feel I got a real flavour of a man whose enthusiasm for science clearly
ignited that of my father-in-law, just as he would ignite mine in turn.
A pacifist Quaker, and uncle of the actor Ralph Richardson, Lewis Fry
Richardson was a major figure in the Met Office in the 1920s. He left that
organisation when he discovered that his work was secretly being used for
chemical warfare. During the First World War, while working as an ambulance
driver on the Western Front, he devised a mathematically based system that
tried to encompass all aspects of weather forecasting.
Assigning numerical values to the physical quantities of weather, Richardson's
system was an attempt at coherence - at getting as near as possible to a
total picture of the mutability of the atmosphere. He envisaged banks of
mathematicians working in a “forecast factory”, in a space something like
the Albert Hall, with a “conductor” shining a beam of light on different
areas of the arena to give instructions.
The forecast factory was a fantasy that technology would eventually make
possible. One of the reasons Richardson is not well known is that his system
could not be properly applied until powerful computers came along in the
1960s, and indeed, only last week the Met Office unveiled a £33 million
supercomputer, capable of performing 125 trillion calculations per second;
the IBM machine occupies two halls, each the size of a football pitch, at
the Met Office's headquarters in Exeter. It will use 1.2 megawatts of power,
enough for a small town. This is the kind of power of which Richardson could
only have dreamt.
Another cause of his relative obscurity is that he became something of a
recluse, retreating - after a career teaching at Paisley Technical College -
to the village of Kilmun in western Scotland, where he worked quietly on his
own until his death. A good deal of his time was spent applying maths to
other areas than weather, in particular to the frequency and likelihood of
wars. He is one of the founding fathers of peace studies as well as of
meteorology.
Richardson also discovered the “Richardson number”, which is a dimensionless
co-ordinate enabling different areas of turbulence to be compared, wherever
they occur in time or space. For fluid dynamicists, the Richardson number
was the Holy Grail. In my novel, it becomes an object of narrative pursuit,
in so far as the protagonist, a young Met Office employee called Henry
Meadows, is sent to Scotland to elicit information about the number from a
figure loosely based on Richardson.
The reason Meadows must seek out this information relates to the most crucial
piece of meteorology of modern times, the weather forecast for D-Day. The
invasion of mainland Europe involved the largest amphibious military
operation in history, that much we all know. What is less well known are the
exact details of the drama of the weather forecast for the operation.
In May and June 1944, as General Eisenhower and other members of the Supreme
Allied Command were pressing for a safe date for invasion of mainland
Europe, arguments between the forecasters associated with the assault were
furious. It didn't help that their discussions were conducted by scrambler
telephone between various locations by people of different nationalities -
British, American and Norwegian - with radically different scientific
philosophies.
As for the weather itself that long-ago summer, it was unusually - there is no
other word for it - turbulent. The chances of meeting the minimum weather
requirements for the invasion were slight.
In the event, during the night of June 3 and the early hours of June 4,
Eisenhower postponed on meteorological advice the invasion of Normandy
planned for June 5, before putting it on again for June 6. Again this was on
the advice of his weather forecasters. The principal forecasters were
Charles Douglas, Irving Krick, Ben Holzman and Sverre Petterssen, together
with contributions from the Royal Navy by Lawrence Hogben and others. These
weather warriors were led by James Stagg, who was, in fact, not a forecaster
but an expert in geomagnetism - this was one of the reasons for the rancour.
Even though it wasn't employed theoretically, the operation behind the D-Day
forecast effectively put into action aspects of Richardson's coherent
scheme. It was the total meteorological effort of the Allies in Europe that
made the forecasts accurate: observers on meteorological reconnaissance
flights over the Atlantic; agents making observations in enemy-held
territory and transmitting them by radio; those breaking the German ciphers
at Bletchley Park so that weather observations from U-boats were available;
the telecommunications staff in camouflaged huts at Met Office headquarters
in Dunstable and at the Citadel of the Admiralty in Whitehall.
Even with all that operational back-up, it is impossible to overemphasise the
difficulty of the task facing D-Day forecasters. They were testing the
limits of predictability: five days' lead time was needed for the invasion,
and at that time it was possible only to forecast accurately about two days
ahead. Like all forecasters, they were limited by the mysterious nature of
turbulence.
Research continues. I was excited to hear that in conjunction with colleagues
in the US, Europe and Japan, Julian Hunt has devised a new theory of
turbulence. Perhaps one day some of the questions about turbulence that made
Einstein want to ask God about it will be answered. But I doubt they will
ever be answered in full.
Turbulence by Giles Foden
Faber and Faber; £16.99 Buy
the book
