The Information Content of Turbulence

Information theory has been wonderfully successful in enhancing communication systems, but is rarely applied directly to natural phenomena. This work is one of the few attempts to treat a physical system as an information source that can be controlled experimentally. It may be the first to do so explicitly over a wide range of parameters. The system here is the velocity fluctuations in a turbulent soap film. The compressed file size of a velocity record is an estimate of the entropy and depends on the Reynolds number. The results are compared with a parallel analysis of the logistic map.