[Flieger]

This is like cosmology. We can see how the turbulence grows and behaves once it has come into existence, but what made it start in the first place? Random fluctuations in the molecular motion of the fluid. Laminar flow on the molecular scale still contains random Brownian motion.

It seems that these guys have a theory like the "inflation" after the big bang, not a theory of why the big bang happened in the first place. And what was there before the big bang for that matter.

There will be a Reynolds number (so a point along a wing) where flow becomes turbulent. This is time independent (well it does depend on velocity, so...) but for an individual fluid "particle" as it flows it could either be expressed in time or space since it is velocity dependent and so time and space are related variables.