Turbulence-an Odyssey

Turbulence is a research field where high expectations have met with recurrent frustration. It is a common perception among physicists, mathematicians and engineers that there is a 'big mystery' behind the phenomenon of turbulence. Its history has also remained anything but well researched. Unlike topics such as quantum theory, which began to attract physics historians as long as fifty years ago, turbulence has - until now - received only little professional historical investigation.

Michael Eckert, born 1949, studied physics at the Technical University in Munich with a diploma in 1976. He received a doctorate in theoretical physics at the University in Bayreuth in 1979. From 1989-1995 he was editor for physics, mathematics and informatics at the Bayerischer Schulbuchverlag. Most of his career, however, was spent at the Research Institute of the Deutsches Museum as a historian of physics. Since his retirement in 2014, he has remained associated with this institute as Senior Researcher.

Eckert's major research projects covered the history of solid state physics, an edition of the scientific correspondence of Arnold Sommerfeld, the history of fluid dynamics, and biographies of Arnold Sommerfeld and Ludwig Prandtl. He has published several books in German and English.