Researcher tells Bram Cohen: fluid blow-ups are inherently unstable and uncontrollable in practice

snikolov · x · 2026-09-17

Responding to Bram Cohen's question about whether a Navier-Stokes counterexample could be physically built, researcher snikolov explains that blow-ups are already unstable: even if initialized theoretically to avoid unstable modes, you could never control the system that precisely in practice.

He speculates that applying a cutoff and summing a handful of terms before frequencies reach unrealistic values might produce an interesting vortex, though it may not look remarkable — and he raises questions about the stability of such structures, referencing the simpler bounded-domain case of simpler equations.

Related event: Bram Cohen Asks If Navier-Stokes Counterexamples Can Be Built Physically(2 posts)→

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