![]() ![]() As he talked, Tao carved shapes in the air with his hands, like a magician. It would be built not of rods and gears but from a pattern of interacting currents. Imagine, he said, that someone awfully clever could construct a machine out of pure water. ![]() Professor Terry Tao, an Australian working at the University of California in Los Angeles, who has won a Fields medal for mathematics, the equivalent of the Nobel prize. It's a decades-old conundrum, and Tao has recently been working on an approach to a solution - one part fanciful, one part outright absurd, like some lost passage from Alice in Wonderland. And yet, Tao explained, nobody can say precisely why. Someone tossing a penny into the fountain by the faculty centre or skipping a stone at the Santa Monica beach could apparently set off a chain reaction that would take out Southern California. A widely used set of equations describes the behaviour of fluids like water, but there seems to be nothing in those equations, he told me, that prevents a wayward eddy from suddenly turning in on itself, tightening into an angry gyre, until the density of the energy at its core becomes infinite: a catastrophic "singularity". This April, as undergraduates strolled along the street outside his modest office on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mathematician Terence Tao mused about the possibility that water could spontaneously explode. ![]()
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