Robert Harry Kraichnan (KRAYSH-nan; January 15, 1928 – February 26, 2008[1]), a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, was an American theoretical physicist best known for his work on the theory of fluid turbulence.
In 2003, he returned to academia when he was appointed Homewood Professor in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, but by this time he had already fallen ill.
He was the recipient of the Lars Onsager Prize and the 1993 Otto Laporte Award of the American Physical Society,[2] and the 2003 Dirac Medal.
[12] This theory is called the inverse Energy Cascade, and it is especially applicable to oceanography and meteorology, since flows on the surface of the earth are approximately two-dimensional.
[15] Following an approach that was echoed by Suraj N. Gupta, Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg, Kraichnan showed that, under some mild secondary assumptions, the full nonlinear equations of general relativity follow from its linearized form: the quantum field theory of a massless spin-2 particle, the graviton, coupled to the stress-energy tensor.