Am I a Vortex?
On the revolving nature of motion and experience
In grad school, I studied fluid motion, a field that, fittingly, revolves around revolving things. Pulled into eddying equations and swirling simulations, I found myself trying to understand the role vortices play in the evolution of turbulent flows. Or more simply: how swirly things shape chaotic motion.
Now, a few years later, a related thought has been stirring in my mind: Why do thoughts stir at all? And what, exactly, are they stirring around?
What follows is my attempt to reconcile the rotational nature of flow with the rotational nature of experience. I’ve split this exploration into two parts.
Part I turns to the physical, where I’ll give a brief overview of the nature of fluid motion as we understand it, featuring vortices, energy cascades, and the chaotic dance between order and disorder in turbulence. If the mention of physics makes you queasy, fear not—I’ve stirred in a bit of poetry to soften the blow. My hope is that, by the end of Part I, you’ll be a little less repelled by fluid mechanics…and maybe even, dare I say, intrigued.
Part II shifts to the metaphysical, where I’ll draw comparisons between what we learn in Part I and the nature of experience. In doing so, we’ll travel to a distant land called Vortexia, home to a lovely population of swirling vortexians. Together, we’ll explore what vortices can teach us about things like self and soul, the nature of knowledge transfer, and the choreography of human thought and movement.
Above all, I hope to help you see the world a little differently by stirring some thoughts of your own. So if you’ll let me, I’d like to pour a little cream into the teacup of your mind, give it a gentle stir, and see if anything new rises to the surface.
I. The Physical
Rotation, Turbulence, and the Energy Cascade
Imagine walking through the crisp morning air. Your breath rises and falls, weaving together the world within you with the one around you. Air spirals through your nostrils and pours into your lungs, where blood flows past ceaselessly, exchanging gases before tumbling through a heart that beats in loops. A case I’ll be making throughout this essay is that existence is deeply fluidic and, alongside that fluidity, deeply rotational.
Even your seemingly solid body moves like a fluid. As you walk, your steps rise and fall, your feet roll off the ground. Stumble, and your body bends, folds, and perhaps even spills into a clumsy cascade of somersaults.
Fluids behave similarly. Whenever they speed up or slow down—whether due to an external influence like a wall, or an internal one like a change in density or viscosity—rotation often follows. Resistance and relaxation often provoke a kind of tripping-up in the fluid: a tumbling, stumbling, and self-enfolding of motion. You’ve likely seen this firsthand. Cream poured into coffee spirals and swells in graceful plumes. Steam rolls and billows above the cup. A paddle drawn through water leaves behind tiny counter-rotating whirlpools that linger in its wake.
In physics, we measure swirling motion with a quantity called vorticity. To understand vorticity, and its dependence on changes in speed, we can turn to how it’s calculated in two dimensions (2D). If we compare the velocity at two nearby points and measure their separation, vorticity emerges as follows:
If we imagine a plane as a fine mesh of points, vorticity can be measured at each point to form a vorticity field. Where vorticity is most intense, vortices tend to arise.1 Think back to the tiny whirlpools left on the water’s surface after a paddle stroke: peak vorticity is found near their cores, forming invisible axes around which fluid spirals inward, accelerating as it nears the center. This results in a pressure drop that draws in more fluid—like a vacuum—organizing the flow into a distinct, coherent, and enduring rotational structure: a vortex.
This rotational axis is something like the axle of a wheel or the stem of a flower. But unlike a wheel’s axle or a flower’s stem, a vortex’s axis isn’t a physical object—it’s a referent around which motion organizes itself. Vorticity is a pseudovector: a value that points out of the plane, perpendicular to the motion it describes.
The axis of a vortex, then, is not a thing, but an idea. Imagine being a tiny being, confined to a 2D plane, floating among the tiny whirlpools trailing the canoe paddle from before. From your 2D perspective, their axes would remain invisible. And yet, by observing where rotation converges, you could infer their presence. Now, if you were to pop out of that 2D plane, you would suddenly perceive these axes as abstract structures transcending your former reality, piercing the cores of these whirlpools and stretching into a higher dimension, beyond the sight, but not the suspicion, of your 2D counterparts.
Hold onto that thought. We’ll return to it in Part II when we explore the nature of self and soul.
—
So far, we’ve explored vorticity in two dimensions. In three-dimensional (3D) space, vorticity can be measured similarly—within each plane—and then combined into a single vector. As in 2D, strong, coherent vorticity in 3D often gives rise to vortices, though their behaviour becomes far more complex. Sometimes, vortices in 3D flows are primarily oriented in one direction; for instance, the axis of a tornado is largely vertical, while that of a wingtip vortex is largely horizontal. However, in fully developed turbulence, vortices can orient in any direction, their axes twisting and coiling into filaments that writhe like tangled threads.
When we hear ‘turbulence,’ we tend to associate it with uncomfortable bumps and the ominous ding of seatbelt signs. This, of course, being the turbulence that we experience on a plane, which is itself an encounter with turbulent atmospheric flow. But the phenomenon runs much deeper. Centuries before turbulence was formalized by physicists, Leonardo da Vinci observed its dual nature, writing:
“[Water] behaves like hair, which has two motions: one conforms to the weight of the mane, the other to the wandering of the locks. Likewise water has its eddying movements, one part of which follows the principal current, the other the random and reverse motion.”2
It’s the presence of these unpredictable, wandering locks that marks turbulence. So, to bring us back to the aircraft experience, just as a watercraft sometimes traverses atop choppy oceanic waves, an aircraft may move through choppy atmospheric undulations.
Broadly speaking, two types of forces act within a fluid: those that induce motion and those that resist it. In this first camp are inertial forces, which scale with mass and acceleration; in the second we find viscous forces which scale with viscosity, a fluid property that describes how well fluid molecules hold together under stress. Turbulence arises when inertia overwhelms viscosity: when large bodies move fast, or when a fluid has a hard time holding itself together. When exactly flows ‘become’ turbulent is a bit fuzzy, just as it’s hard to say when exactly a fluid’s swirling surface ‘becomes’ a whirlpool. But, as with the whirlpool, when you see it, you know it.
For a fluid to come alive, motion must be breathed into it. Kinetic energy, a conserved quantity associated with motion, is the spiritus of turbulence. You yourself can breathe some turbulence into the world right now just by exhaling. But how exactly does this gust ‘make’ the surrounding air more unruly?
In turbulent flows, the kinetic energy of unpredictable movement follows a suprisingly predictable path. In the 20th century, Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov formalized this as the energy cascade, which suggests that, in 3D turbulence, turbulent kinetic energy generally cascades from larger to smaller length scales. The process unfolds through vortex interactions: larger eddies stretch, stir and distort slightly smaller ones, which in turn agitate those still smaller, transferring energy down the line. When an eddy is too small relative to a larger one, it isn’t stretched—it’s simply swept along by the larger eddy until a suitably sized vortex comes along to stretch it. As eddies shrink into thin, stringy tendrils, their motion is eventually smeared into heat by molecular diffusion.
The process is summed up nicely in this poem by English mathematician Lewis F. Richardson:
Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity, And little whirls have lesser whirls and so on to viscosity
This cascading interplay between large and small whirls forms the basis of how we understand turbulence: some eddies fall like leaves to the floor, composting into a fertile bed from which a few lucky seeds of small perturbations bloom into bustling whooshes and whirls.
Turbulence, then, presents a fascinating paradox. It’s a field of chaos where vortices, those little islands of order, spiral into being. Irish poet W. B. Yeats saw this too, writing in Coole Park of flocks of swallows that
…seemed to whirl upon a compass-point, Found certainty upon the dreaming air…
So long as there is some source of energy to sustain movement, chaos and order within a turbulent fluid sustain the other. Vortices could not be without the instabilities that provoke their self-enfolding, and instabilities could not be without vortices tending to their growth. Turbulence spirals into chaos, yet those very spirals are orderly. Certainty is found upon the ‘dreaming air.’
Yeats again, in The Magi, evokes a strikingly similar image to the energy cascade:
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find one more, Being by Cavalry’s turbulence unsatisfied, The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
Here, the ‘uncontrollable mystery’ strains to climb from the ‘bestial floor,’ much like the smallest eddies that insatiably feed on the turbulent energy of larger ones. Each rotates about ‘fixed eyes,’ hovering ‘side by side’ along the cascade.
—
One last physical phenomenon before we shift to metaphysics.
In 2D turbulence, turbulent kinetic energy actually doesn’t cascade from big whirls to little ones as it does in 3D. Instead, it follows an inverse cascade, where energy flows from little whirls to big ones. Rather than large eddies stretching smaller ones, when two co-rotating vortices draw near in 2D, the larger one ‘swallows up’ the smaller one as they merge into an even larger, stronger vortex. This is known as vortex merging. Over time, in 2D systems, turbulent kinetic energy then accumulates at increasingly large scales, as like-signed vortices combine into more powerful rotational structures.
Curiously, 2D turbulence thus resists the universal tendency toward disorder—a process governed by the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy. While entropy must always increase overall, 2D turbulence resists this fate by concentrating energy into coherent, long-lived vortices. A similar, though weaker and more short-lived, effect is observed in 3D turbulence as well.
But why study 2D turbulence at all, when the real world has three spatial dimensions? Because in quasi-two-dimensional (~2D) systems—where one spatial dimension is much smaller than the other two—the physics often behave more like 2D turbulence than 3D. This holds true for planetary scale flows, like weather systems and ocean currents, where the horizontal extent dwarfs the vertical.3 Hurricanes, for instance, offer a familiar example of vortex merging, where populations of small energy-containing eddies, often originating off the African coast, bubble up due to solar heating, then interact, mingle, and merge into a bloated vortex that traverses the Atlantic until they reach land, where friction breaks them apart and scatters their energy.
In 2D turbulence, then, energy doesn’t dissipate into microscopic chaos as quickly as in 3D. Instead, it condenses into larger, longer-lived structures. This has fascinating parallels to human organizations, which, rather than quickly dissolving into disorder, often coalesce into larger, structured collectives: expanding empires, enduring institutions, and vast, interconnected societies. We’ll explore this similarity in more detail in Part II.
Okay, I think that’s enough to give us a solid—er, I mean fluid—physical basis to jump off of—er, I mean set sail from. Let’s have some fun and set sail into the metaphysical, shall we?
II. The Metaphysical
Vortexia, Selves, and Souls
Recall our 2D model of vorticity: experience confined to a horizontal plane, yet animated by invisible rotational axes reaching into the vertical. Why not give this world a name? Let’s call it Vortexia—a land whose inhabitants live upon the plane of vortexistence, with a hidden vertical dimension we might call the vortical dimension. Let’s see what happens when we pour some energy into this world; maybe we’ll breathe some life into some inspirited vortexians!
On the western side of the Vortexia, we might stumble upon a Platonic vortex who imagines a Spindle of Vorcessity bringing into being all vortices, where on “the top of each of its circles is fixed a [Gyren], who goes round with them, hymning a single sound and note. The [Gyrates], daughters of [Vorcessity], robed in white, with garlands on their heads, chant to the harmony of the [Gyrens]: Lachesis sings of the past, Clotho of the present, and Atropos of the future” (Plato, Republic). How elaborately profound!
And look—over there! A pious Augustinian vortex who, sensing the axes of his fellow virtuous vortices transcending toward the heavens, is making the astute observation that “The [axis] is not the whole [vortex], but the better part of [vortex]; the [rotating] body is not the whole [vortex], but the lower part of [vortex]; the two together are [vorticity]” (Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love). Yes, exactly!
Ah, and over there on Gyreland, a Yeatsian gyrishman proclaims:
…I declare this [axis] is my symbol; I declare This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair... (Yeats, Blood and the Moon)
Looks like he feels the axes, too. Oh, and would you look at this disciplined Wittgensteinian vortex, in such deep contemplation, scribbling in his notebook: “I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which [my] body rotates. [My] axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but [my] movement around it determines its immobility” (Wittgenstein, On Certainty). An astute observation indeed, good spur.
How about the eastern side? Here might emerge a compassionate Buddhist vortex, reminding a student that the cycle of vortex birth and death “has no known beginning. No first point of [vortices] roaming and wandering can be found, hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving” (Samyutta Nikaya 15.1). But, “when one understands that the [rotational] body is like foam, a mirage, then one breaks the cycle” (Dhammapada 46), realizing that “all beings, whether with or without [vorticiousness], possess [Vortex-nature], which is eternal, unchanging, and pure” (Mahaparinirvana Sutra). Good point, or should I say good points? After all, vorticity can be found at every point in the plane of vortexistence. It may be small in some spots, but it’s never exactly zero.4
Speaking of stillness, a Taoist vortex is noticing an effortless stillness at her core, musing: “[Countless] spokes share [my] hub; It is [my] empty center that makes [me] useful” (Tao Te Ching, Ch. 11). A fellow gentle-vortex then remarks “The revolving of [sp]in and [boomer]ang is the great harmony. When one waxes, the other wanes, and when one wanes, the other waxes. This turning is the way of [rotature], the unceasing flow of the [Spirao]” (Zhuangzi, Inner Chapters). Ah, music to my gears.
Last we might happen upon a Hindu vortex preaching to his brethren that “the Supreme [Vorticity] dwells in the hearts of all [vortices], O [Ar-turn-a], by His illusive power causing all [vortices] to revolve as though mounted on a potter’s wheel” (Bhagavad Gita 18.61). Feeling the infinitesimal point piercing their hearts yet stretching into the infinite vortical unknown, his brethren proclaim: “subtler than the subtlest, [yet] greater than the greatest... by the light of [whirlsdom], the wise perceive that Supreme [Vorticity]” (Shvetashvatara Upanishad 3.20). Namaste, vortexians.
And just to think of all the vortices we’ve missed! How wonderful it would be to join them all on the plane of vortexistence.
—
The plane of vortexistence seems familiar, doesn’t it?
I began with how curious it is that our descriptions of experience so often involve rotation: we’re surrounded by experience as thoughts stir in our minds and we wrap our heads around problems. From the moment I enter this world, time draws me forth as everything around me, including my body, moves and changes. And yet, amidst all that activity, this central experiencer that I call ‘me’ seems strangely constant.
But what is this ‘me’, exactly? If I seek it out, trying to pinpoint the source of my awareness, I might ask: Who’s thinking these thoughts? But this begins a regress of Who’s thinking these thoughts about who's thinking these thoughts… and so on. And yet, struggling to find the thinker anywhere, each of us feels that the answer to this infinite questioning can be summed up in the simplest way: Me—I’m thinking these thoughts.
This reminds me of our vortexians. As each swirls into being, its surroundings give rise to a unique vorticity vector, piercing its core and extending into the vortical unknown. But because they live on a 2D plane, vortexians can’t see this axis intersecting their world. In fact, the axis leaves no visible trace at all, because its horizontal footprint is infinitesimally small. That’s what makes it a line, not a column! And yet this axial presence is deeply felt by vortexians. It is from that invisible core that an enlivening perfume of experience blooms, as “it floats, it flows about [their] starborn flesh and loose it streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents of the cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling, writhing in the skies” (James Joyce, Ulysses).
—
Though a vortex’s axis of rotation remains invisible, something remarkable happens near its intersect. The closer we get to it, the more the surrounding fluid accelerates. Pressure drops, drawing fluid inward, pulling it faster and faster toward the center. But what happens at the core? Or, in 3D, along the filament threading through its center?
Mathematically, this point (or series of points) becomes a singularity, a place where velocity, in theory, approaches infinity. Now, in reality, vortex cores don’t spin at infinite speed, lest your waving hand spawn a glittering parade of singularities in the surrounding air. While William Blake suggested you could “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour,”5 I don’t think this was quite what he had in mind.
Instead, near the core, fluid becomes solid-like as the fluid’s viscous forces resist rapid increases in velocity, dissipating the onslaught of swirling flow into heat. One might say that the fluid molecules band together to preserve the fluid’s identity, linking arms against dissolution and resisting transformation into something that the fluid, as a whole, is not.
What unfolds, then, is a dramatic shift: as fluid spirals inward, it spins faster and faster, until viscosity says enough is enough and abruptly decelerates the fluid. This abrupt deceleration creates a ring of elevated pressure at the core’s edge, within which fluid rotates like a solid body6, with motion now slowing as it approaches the center.
The faster the vortex spins, the sharper this transition. The core concentrates, its boundary hardens, and the tranquil center grows ever insulated from the surrounding storm. The more violent the flow, the more serene the eye. And remarkably, despite this rapid shift in fluid behavior, it’s all the same fluid. In fact, it’s this resistance—this refusal to dissolve—that allows the fluid to remain whole.
Check out this video to get a feel for it:
Mesmerizing, isn’t it?
—
Now, what does all this tell us about the flow of experience?
The core of a vortex is preserved by viscosity—a kind of fluidic selfhood that resists dissolution against the surrounding turbulence. In the same way, we as experiencers flow through experience, enrobed in bodies, whether physical or metaphysical, which seem to separate us from the surrounding turbulence of life. But perhaps, from a vortexian view, these bodies aren’t barriers at all. Perhaps they’re what allow the whole of experience to remain coherent: a kind of existential viscosity that slows and integrates change rather than dissolving in it.
Consciousness, then, might be imagined as a metaphysical whirlpool: a swirling basin in which nebulous thoughts and feelings spiral inward, their motion intensifying as they approach an experiential center. In the turbulent yet coherent outer layers of that whirlpool, we might find our flowering, silken sheet of concsiousness unfurling to embrace those we care for in a sheet embroidered with their unique signatures. This swirling sheet of familiarity, with which we so intimately identify, is perhaps what we call the self.
Now, where exactly its boundary lies is less clear. Is it sharply defined? Frayed at the edges? Or does it simply melt into the surrounding flow? When, exactly, does the swirling surface of a fluid become a whirlpool—and when does it cease to be?
Let’s approach the center. Relativity tells us that where things accelerate, time slows.7 And in the freeflowing metaphysical realm, thoughts, feelings, and sensations seem to accelerate all the more as they spiral toward our experiential cores, leading to a kind of singularity of experience.
Right now, a flood of energy is not merely pouring through you, but flowing with you—a swirling flow that you can be, at least partially, aware of. And in that awareness arises a strange serenity: not an absence of motion, but a clarity within it. As attention sharpens, presence condenses around the experiential core, drawn inward by a metaphysical gravity that slows time toward the timeless.
But as presence deepens, and the experiential core condenses to an infinitesimal point, something remarkable happens. An impenetrable boundary forms, as if existence itself were straining to hold together against the incoming wave. Within that boundary, in a brilliant turn of metaphysical relativity, motion slows, and the timeless beyond folds into an eternal within—quiet, concentrated, and untouched by the surrounding chaos. This, perhaps, is what we call the soul.
In this view, just as the swirling eddy and its core remain deeply interwoven with the surrounding fluid, while nevertheless seeming to be separate from it, so too is the experiencer deeply interwoven with existence while feeling separate from it. In this sense, the Buddhist notion that the self is illusory doesn’t seem so far-fetched, for the self is never truly separate from the whole. At the same time, this metaphysical singularity described at the core, whose impenetrable crust straddles timelessness and eternity, may offer a way to understand the indestructible, eternal soul described in Hindu and Abrahamic traditions (among others).
In sum, the experiencer, like a vortex, is inseperable from the stream within which they swirl. If the self is but a whirling eddy in the greater flow of existence, perhaps what we call the soul is the stillness we find at its heart.
—
In War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote of our fluid-like nature when the character Pierre dreamt of being shown a globe by an old teacher.
This globe was alive — a vibrating ball without fixed dimensions. Its whole surface consisted of drops closely pressed together, and all these drops moved and changed places, sometimes several of them merging into one, sometimes one dividing into many. Each drop tried to spread out and occupy as much space as possible, but others, striving to do the same, compressed it, sometimes destroyed it, and sometimes merged with it.
‘That is life,’ said the old teacher.
‘How simple and clear it is,’ thought Pierre. ‘How is it I did not know before?’
While Tolstoy likened life to liquid drops, we might just as easily swap drop for vortex.
So far, we’ve focused on individual vortices. But turbulence isn’t made of solitary swirls. As Tolstoy observed, it’s a teeming field of vortices that merge, divide, and strain amongst eachother. So how do they interact? And might understanding their interactions help us, as experiential vortices, better understand ourselves?
We’ll make use of two perspectives here. One is proximal and 3D, close-up and embodied. The other is distal and ~2D, a birds-eye view. Depending on the lens we use, the physics—and perhaps the metaphysics—of energy exchange behaves quite differently.
Let’s start with 3D.
In 3D turbulence, kinetic energy cascades from larger to smaller scales as coherent vortices stretch and accelerate slightly smaller ones through a process called vortex stretching. But what do we mean when we say vortices stretch one another?
Recall that the core of a 3D vortex is like a wavy filament. Tug on it from both ends and it twirls faster, like a figure skater drawing in their limbs. This is vortex vitality’s secret sauce: to be stretched is to be energized.
This stretching is thought to be the principal mechanism of energy transfer between vortices, where a slightly larger vortex pulls taut the filament of a slightly smaller neighbour. While optimal stretching occurs when vortex axes are aligned, though not strictly parallel, real interactions in turbulence are unbelievably complex. Filaments twist, tangle, and braid through one other in unpredictable ways. And yet, amid all this mess, patterns emerge, like vortices and the energy cascade.
My sense is that knowledge and understanding cascade in a similar way, both within minds and between minds, where thoughts and ideas swirl like eddies, interpenetrating one another and jostling to capture attention. If our minds are vortex-like, they’ll stretch as ideas wind their way between and within them. Profound ideas won’t always land in shallow minds (they’re just too overwhelming). Instead, shallow minds are simply swept along until they encounter just slightly more sophisticated ideas that inspire (or stretch) them toward deeper understandings. And the more coherent, resonant, and energized a thought or idea is, the more likely it is to gain presence, drawing awareness to its core.
Near the ‘bestial floor’ of this metaphysical cascade, where ideas are too incoherent or misaligned to catch onto anything, ideas dwindle into an ‘uncontrollable mystery’. Just as in the physical cascade, where withering eddies are diffused into a form of energy unusable by other vortices (heat, entropy), so too in the metaphysical cascade do withering ideas diffuse into a form of metaphysical energy unavailable to other minds. As Yeats wrote in Spilt Milk:
We that have done and thought, That have thought and done, Must ramble, and thin out Like milk spilt on a stone
But some ideas rise. Some cohere just enough to survive, yet remain flexible enough to twist, tilt, and align with something greater. In doing so, they expose themselves to the painful grace of stretching as they accumulate presence. And as more ideas and more minds co-align and coaelesce and collect more presence, ideologies take form.
Now we zoom out to our ~2D perspective.
Recall that in ~2D systems the vertical dimension is much smaller than the horizontal, and in these systems turbulent energy accumulates as co-rotating vortices merge into larger, longer-lived organizations. While this happens to be the case for inorganic weather systems on Earth, it might also apply to the flow of organic systems spread across its surface.
Especially so for us humans who, throughout history, have coalesced into empires, institutions, and interwoven societies. At the heart of every one of these enduring systems lies a shared ideology—an invisible axis around which human motion organizes, a stem from which greater experiences bloom.
Just as co-rotating vortices merge in ~2D flows, the like-minded merge to form like-minded collectives, following an inverse cascade as they establish institutions and moral frameworks that encourage not only proper rotation but, ultimately, proper alignment so that rotation may be sustained. In doing so, ideologies and their proponents form a kind of meta-vortex whose culture blooms from outreaching petals, enveloping constituent vortices who feed on the ambrosial ideal nestled within its eternal core.
Within this embrace, each vortex strains to reflect its meta-vortex to the fullest extent, collectively struggling to orient their axes toward the same heavenly ideal. Some inevitably miss the mark, but together they reinforce a shared resonance, coherence, and vitality. This, in turn, invites more awareness, more presence, and more life toward the heart of the movement, distilling the ideal into something timelessly eternal, and allowing both the meta-vortex and its vortices to carry on revolving with renewed purpose.
In that same dream, Tolstoy writes of this sacred motion:
‘Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life, there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in innocent sufferings.’ […] ‘God is in the midst, and each drop [vortex] tries to expand so as to reflect Him to the greatest extent. And it grows, merges, disappears from the surface, sinks to the depths, and again emerges… Do you understand my child?’
Trying my best to wrap my head around it.
—
Not always. For instance, vortices are less likely to form if there is also a strong local shear, which also depends on changes in speed.
Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, as translated in Lugli 2016.
On the order of ~10^6 km horizontally versus a vertical ~1 km for ocean flows and ~10 km for tropospheric flows.
Except at a temperature of zero kelvin, which we can only approach asymptotically in any case. Or when changes in velocities balance one another exactly, although again, perfect balance can only be approached asymptotically. But I digress.
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Also known as a Rankine vortex.
Relative to a slower observer.