Another one about faith: The Navier-Stokes equation

There’s something oddly comforting about how little we know. I’ve been thinking about this lately—how often we just go about life, trusting things to work without fully understanding them. Like sitting on a chair. You don’t analyse its joints or question the physics of weight distribution; you just sit, trusting it to hold you. And most of the time, it does.

That kind of quiet, unspoken trust happens all the time. We step into elevators, board airplanes, drink water from a tap (or in less privileged parts of the world, water dispenser)—rarely pausing to consider the complex mechanics involved. We don’t know every detail, but we know enough to trust. And maybe that’s all faith really is: knowing just enough to move forward. Perhaps, it's not the belief without doubt. It's a belief despite.

Lately, I've been thinking about the Navier-Stokes equations. They’re a set of equations that explain how fluids move—things like air, water, or even the blood flowing through our veins. When you blow on a spoonful of hot soup and watch the surface swirl, or when you see clouds stretch and curl across the sky, that’s fluid motion at work. The Navier-Stokes equations are supposed to describe those movements.

But here’s the thing: we haven’t fully solved these equations yet. We know how fluids behave in calm, predictable situations—like water moving slowly through a smooth pipe. But when things get chaotic, like when waves crash on the shore or turbulence hits mid-flight, the equations become unpredictable. We don’t know if there’s always a neat, solvable answer hidden within that complexity. In fact, the work is so important that whoever is able to solve it will be rewarded with $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute. How. Grand.

And yet… despite the work remaining a mystery, we keep moving. We build planes that fly across oceans, even though turbulence is still a mystery. Engineers don’t fully understand how air will behave when it meets sudden, sharp currents, but they use approximations that work well enough to get us safely to our destinations.

Weather forecasting works the same way. Meteorologists plug what we know of these equations into supercomputers to predict storms and heatwaves. Sure, the forecasts aren’t perfect—rain still surprises us sometimes—but the big patterns, like hurricanes, are mapped well enough to save lives.

Even plumbing systems owe their reliability to these equations. Water flowing through pipes, adjusting to changes in pressure, avoiding turbulence—it’s all guided by principles we partially understand. We trust that when we turn the faucet, water will flow, even though the physics behind that everyday act isn’t fully solved.

What fascinates me is how this incomplete understanding doesn’t stop us. We live in a world built on partial knowledge, and yet we don’t let that uncertainty paralyse us. We innovate, build, and explore anyway.

Maybe that’s the beauty of it. Faith doesn’t have to be grand or abstract. Sometimes, it’s just trusting that the plane will fly, the faucet will run, and the chair will hold. Not because we know everything, but because we know enough. So here’s to the mysteries we haven’t solved yet—and to the quiet confidence that, somehow, we’ll figure it out along the way.