Turbulence is chaotic, bumpy movement in air or water. People often use it to describe the rough shaking you feel on an airplane.
From Latin "turbulentia," related to "turba" meaning crowd or confusion and "turbo" meaning whirlwind. It originally suggested noisy disorder before being used in physics for irregular fluid flow.
Airplane turbulence feels scary, but planes are built to handle much rougher air than passengers ever experience. In physics, turbulence is so complex that even supercomputers struggle to predict it exactly—nature’s chaos in motion.
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