Introduction
This report is an attempt to understand and learn from the ideas and inventions of the Austrian forester Viktor Schauberger. Viktor Schauberger already in the 1920s warned about environmental crisis, at a time at which it was not, as today, something recognized. During his lifetime, he encountered resistance and ridicule, and his perspective may still today be labelled as unconventional and unorthodox, although much of what he wrote about our handling of waters and forests today is more relevant than ever. As he wasn't an academic, but was more of a natural philosopher, he had trouble to communicate his ideas with contemporary scientists. In this report, we'll try to show how modern research in chaos and self-organizing systems give us a possibility to shed some new light on Vikor Schauberger, and perhaps establish a deeper understanding of the phenomena he described.
Viktor Schauberger
We will call our perspective self-organizing flow, so called since the technology described exploits the intrinsic order spontaneously created by a system, during the right conditions.
Such a view was advanced in the 1920s by the Austrian naturalist Viktor Schauberger (1). Schauberger was a forester and timber-floating expert. He was no academic, but he had a long tradition of studies of nature to rely on. He also had rich opportunities to study the processes of nature in untouched areas, when it came to the handling of watercourses and the quality of water. His approach was that man should study nature and learn from it, rather than trying to correct it --- a view that was rather controversial at his time (1). He noted that mankind had a developed technology for exploitation of water, but still knew very little of the processes of natural waters, and the laws for their behaviour in an untouched state.
Schauberger gave the following example: In a mountain stream he observed a trout which apparently stood still in the midst of rapidly streaming water. The trout merely manoeuvred slightly, looking rather free from effort. When it got alerted it fled against the stream --- not with it, which at first sight would have seemed to be more natural.
On some occasions a cauldron of warm water was poured into the stream, quite a long distance upstream from the fish, for a moment making the river water slightly warmer. As this water reached the fish, it could no longer sustain its position in the stream, but was swept away with the flowing water, not returning until later. From this experiment Schauberger concluded that temperature differences is of great importance in natural river systems. He even tried to copy the effect of the natural movements of the trout in a kind of turbine, which he coined trout turbine.
By studying the gills of the fish (1), Schauberger found what looked like guide vanes. These, he theorized, would guide streaming water in a vortex motion backwards. By creating a rotating flow, a pressure increase would result behind the fish, and a corresponding pressure decrease in front of it, which would help it to keep its place in the stream (2). |
