Interesting, Bruce, thanks.
BTW: on the subject of being of use to Nick re: his burning question of why
water goes down the sink drain the way it does, Nick appears to have
rejected the characterization of this phenomenon as a "really, really hard"
fluid flow systems problem requiring graduate-level studies in the specialty
areas of fluid dynamics sciences as the necessary basis for developing an
answer.
Which leaves us where?
Apparently with Nick bitching that no one will answer his question. I mean,
it's a simple question, right?
Also, as to Nick's suggestion that this list should refocus on complexity
issues: I don't think I've ever worked on a more complex problem than when
I was developing simulations of fluid flow systems.
But, it was just a simple question, right?
--Doug
On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 10:21 AM, Bruce Sherwood <bruce.sherw...@gmail.com>wrote:
> 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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--
Doug Roberts
drobe...@rti.org
d...@parrot-farm.net
http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins
<http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins>
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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