An Injection of Chaos Solves Decades-Old Fluid Mystery

Cool article. The linked paper has more details, and math. " energy dissipated by pore-scale fluctuations generates the anomalous increase in the overall flow resistance." Unfortunately they are still at the stage of defining that it happens, not, why? Which is interesting - there is still so much to learn! https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2619

This just means they are subbing out simulation details for injected randomness, no? I thought this was a technique that was known to work in general.

I.e. since the combination of many random events is a bell curve if you just put a bell curve somewhere you don't understand something you can get good results.

I’m surprised the article didn’t draw an analogy to a traffic jam. The counterintuitive response of decreased throughput from increased flow reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess's_paradox