It's a long way from Oregon to Italy. But now that ICTP's newest staff member, Joseph Niemela, has arrived, he plans to stay for a while.

Trail to Trieste

'Enjoy your visitbut don't stay!' No, this was certainly not my welcome here in Trieste, Italy, but three decades ago it was oddly the official 'greeting' in the place where I am from--the state of Oregon in the Pacific Northwest, USA--defiantly delivered by our conservationist and governor Tom McCall in a red-hot campaign against the private development of Oregon's scenic lands.
Nothing defines a place like its politics. That the liberal McCall belonged to the conservative Republican party of then-president Richard Nixon is not atypical at all of Oregon, and only confirms the conventional thinking: that Oregonians of all stripes are unabashed nonconformists.
Oregon--a land of very tall trees and very unconventional citizens--marks the beginning of a long journey for myself, and a shipment of scientific equipment, some of it shown still crated in the accompanying picture.

Joseph Niemela

The centrepiece of this shipment is a relatively massive low-temperature apparatus, nominally operating at about 5 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero, and designed to investigate buoyancy-driven turbulence in a one-meter tall layer of helium gas heated from below.
Why so big, so cold, and, well, so unconventional? Simply put, cryogenic helium gas is, by far, the optimum working fluid for producing intense thermally generated turbulence under controlled laboratory conditions. Likewise, sample heights as large as possible are desirable.
Thus was born this super-sized refrigerated experiment--lovingly called 'the beast' by its operators--designed to aggressively push the frontiers of laboratory turbulence research.
Indeed, beyond the frontiers of this experiment lies a larger purpose: to broaden our understanding of turbulent convection, a ubiquitous flow that plays a prominent role, for example, in the energy transport within stars, atmospheric and oceanic circulations, the generation of the Earth's magnetic field, and innumerable engineering processes in which heat transport is a key factor. More generally, fluid turbulence is a paradigm for nonlinear systems far from equilibrium, with many interacting degrees of freedom. Loosely analogous problems range from weather to fluctuating stock markets.
Experiments will be conducted at Trieste's Elettra Synchrotron Laboratory, in collaboration with ICTP's director, Katepalli R. Sreenivasan. We anticipate that this new research initiative will include close interactions with other groups at ICTP and elsewhere both here in Trieste and beyond. And because many fluid mechanics problems have the advantage of minimal equipment costs and relatively rapid scientific progress, the intellectual challenges these problems pose fit well with ICTP's historical mandate to help scientists from the developing world acquire the knowledge and skill they need to participate in global science.
I am grateful for the warm personal welcome I have received since arriving at ICTP and the fact that the Centre operates within such a vibrant scientific atmosphere. Contrary to my contrarian Oregonians, I've 'enjoyed the visit and plan to stay.'

Joseph Niemela
ICTP Fluid Dynamics Group

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