I don't pretend to have much of a grasp of what the article is describing, but it sounds very "frictionless spherical cow in a vacuum". I'd be amazed if this technique could be applied to something as messy as turbulence.

For lengthwise compression I didn't mean anything as abstruse as relativistic effects, just normal physical compression. If you accelerate something by pushing on the back of it, it's going to squish to some extent.