Nobels Neglect Fluid Dynamics

This month's issue of Physics Today includes a letter to the editor from Rajan Menon, under the headline that I've reproduced as the title of this post.  Prompted by P. W. Anderson's obituary, Menon argues that "well-known physicists have worked in different aspects of fluid mechanics," mentioning Arnold Sommerfeld and Werner Heisenberg.  He then mentions three outstanding fluid dynamicists of the 20th century:  Ludwig Prandtl, Theodore von Karman, and G. I. Taylor.  Menon tells us that both Taylor and von Karman thought that Prandtl deserved a Nobel Prize in Physics.  Certainly all three of these illustrious individuals should have been strong candidates for the Nobel Prize, in my view.

Menon's letter nicely complements a post of mine from 2014, Nobel laureates and fluid dynamics research.  In that post I discuss the one Nobel Physics Prize that did seem to be awarded for research in fluid dynamics (H. Alfven, 1970) as well as the fluid dynamics activities of several other Nobel laureates, both in physics and chemistry, including Heisenberg.  I believe that Menon is essentially correct that "the field of mechanics, has been routinely neglected in considerations for the physics Nobel Prize."  However, aside from Prandtl, von Karman, and Taylor, all now long-dead, it is unclear to me who else should be a candidate.  The list of winners of the APS Fluid Dynamics Prize, for instance, features many outstanding researchers in this field, but what accomplishment would rise to the level of say, Prandtl's boundary layer theory, of such consequence to be honored by a Nobel Prize in physics?  To make the question more concrete, if the Nobel committee were to respond to Menon by selecting a Nobel Physics Prize for research in fluid dynamics next year, who would be the candidates among living fluid dynamicists? 

Menon proposes that if the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millenium Prize for proving the existence and smoothness of solutions to the 3-dimensional Navier-Stokes Equations is ever awarded, that person is deserving of a Nobel Physics Prize as well.  Though I sympathize greatly with Menon's letter, this is the one place I would part company with him.  The solution to this problem is rightly deserving of a top mathematics award, but I do not think it worthy of a Nobel Prize in Physics, simply because it is unclear a priori what physical insight would be gleaned from such a proof.

I would propose that the criteria for a Nobel Physics Prize to be awarded to fluid dynamics should be either for work of a total game-changing nature in the field, like Prandtl's boundary layer theory, or an advance in fluid dynamics that has colossal ripple effects in other areas of physics or technology, like Alfven's work in magnetohydrodynamics, including Alfven waves, which impact on plasma physics and astrophysics.

On the flip side, I do think Nobel physics laureates should continue to contribute their talents to fluid dynamics, as Rayleigh, Purcell, Landau, Onsager, and Chandrasekhar did.