Terence Tao

So by doing that, the energy inches forward scale by scale in such a way that it's always localized at one scale at a time.

And then it can resist the effects of viscosity because it's not dispersed.

So in order to make that happen,

yeah, I had to construct a rather complicated non-linearity.

Um, and it was basically like, um, you know, like it was constructed like an electronic circuit.

So I, I actually thank my wife for this because she was trained as a electrical engineer.

Um, and, um, you know, she talked about, um,

He had to design circuits and so forth.

And if you want a circuit that does a certain thing, like maybe have a light that flashes on and then turns off and then on and then off, you can build it from more primitive components, capacitors and resistors and so forth.

And you have to build a diagram.

And these diagrams, you can sort of follow it with your eyeballs and say, oh yeah, the current will build up here and then it will stop and then it will do that.

So I knew how to build the analog of basic electronic components, like resistors and capacitors and so forth, and I would stack them together in such a way that I would create something that would open one gate, and then there would be a clock, and then once the clock hits a certain threshold, it would close it.

It was kind of a Rube Goldberg-type machine, but described mathematically.

And this ended up working.

So what I realized is that if you could pull the same thing off for the actual equations, so if...

The equations of water support a computation.

You can imagine a steampunk, but it's really a waterpunk type of thing.

Modern computers are electronic.

They're powered by electrons passing through very tiny wires and interacting with other electrons and so forth.

Instead of electrons, you can imagine these pulses of water moving at a certain velocity.