I can offer some historical context on why physicists at least are, on
average, unlikely to give Nick much help.
In the 1950s Halliday and Resnick, then at Pitt, created a new-style
intro university-level ("calculus-based") physics textbook, for the
freshman/sophomore course taken by engineering and science students.
Their motives included emphasizing depth rather than breadth, as
existing textbooks tended to be shallow surveys of a vast field. At a
conference at RPI honoring Resnick upon his retirement, Resnick
explained that in the service of the laudable goal of emphasizing
depth they had to eliminate some topics, and one of the topics they
mostly dropped was fluids, reasoning that the basics were covered in
the high school survey course.
With time, the book universally referred to as "Halliday and Resnick"
gathered a huge audience and is still at this very late date the most
widely used university textbook (now "Halliday , Resnick, and
Walker"). There was a trickle-down effect, because high school physics
is strongly influenced by university physics."Since Halliday and
Resnick downplay fluids, so will we", and as Resnick ruefully
acknowledged in his retirement address, fluids basically disappeared.
Fluids even disappeared from the curriculum taken by physics majors.
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that most physicists today
know very little about fluids (with exceptions, of course).
Occasionally there are clarion calls for bringing fluids back into the
education of physicists, but I've not seen any significant movement in
that direction.
In our own university intro physics textbook ("Matter & Interactions";
see matterandinteractions.org), Ruth Chabay and I emphasize starting
analyses from a small number of fundamental principles rather than
from one of a very large number of secondary formulas, and we
emphasize the insights available from exploiting simple atomic models
of matter. In the first chapter we comment that in the service of
these emphases we'll analyze solids and gases but not liquids. Solids
have the simple property that the atoms don't move around very much,
and gases have the simple property that the atoms interact rather
seldom, whereas in liquids the atoms move around a lot AND they
continually interact. So in our own small way we contribute to the
continuing absence of fluid mechanics in physics curricula.
I'll add that my own perception is that fluid dynamics is really
really hard. It is a fiercely complex phenomenon. I don't think I've
ever seen a popular-science treatment of fluids, whereas there are
lots of good books on "simple" stuff like quantum mechanics....
Bruce
P.S. My own undergraduate education was in engineering at Purdue, and
I had a wonderful aeronautical engineering course on fluid dynamics
taught by Paul Lykoudis and using the textbook by Prandtl. Alas, I
never used this knowledge and it atrophied, so I'm no use to Nick.
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