Cantorian Fractal Space-Time Fluctuations in Turbulent Fluid Flows and the Kinetic Theory of Gases

Abstract

Fluid flows such as gases or liquids exhibit space-time fluctuations on all scales extending down to molecular scales. Such broadband continuum fluctuations characterise all dynamical systems in nature and are identified as selfsimilar fractals in the newly emerging multidisciplinary science of nonlinear dynamics and chaos. A cell dynamical system model has been developed by the author to quantify the fractal space-time fluctuations of atmospheric flows. The earth's atmosphere consists of a mixture of gases and obeys the gas laws as formulated in the kinetic theory of gases developed on probabilistic assumptions in 1859 by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell. An alternative theory using the concept of fractals and chaos is applied in this paper to derive these fundamental gas laws.