[ncmncm]

If you think the Navier-Stokes equations are hard, try the version that plasma physicists have to use, instead.

Rather than confront those, cosmologists have chosen to pretend that, while every single thing they can see is plasma (excepting, uniquely, planets), none of it does anything plasma-ish.

Since plasma physics is scale-invariant, freaky phenomena seen in labs should be playing out at stellar, galactic, and super-cluster scale. If they don't, it needs explanation why not.

Huge props to solar physicists, who confront plasma physics, face-to-face, daily.

[xelxebar]

I picked up a copy of Chandrasekar's "Hydrodynamic and Magnetodynamic Stability" a while back and started working through it. The basics are relatively approachable, but dang the differential equations can get gnarly. It feels like a large portion of the art is in asking the right question that can aviod toppling into a mess of non-linearities.

Really good book, as far as I got through it. The beginning has a nice derivation of Navier-Stokes, which was mew to me.

[ncmncm]

The mess of non-linearities is where the action is, at least in nature. Designing systems to stay out of that mess is, as you say, art.