Simply titillating, Pamela.
--Doug
On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 11:01 AM, Pamela McCorduck <pam...@well.com> wrote:
> I find this discussion fascinating, especially because it mirrors an
> ongoing discussion between me (liberal arts trained) and my beloved (applied
> mathematician/computer scientist). In over forty years, we've found that we
> can talk to each other at some level about these issues, but I don't expect
> him to read a novel the way I do, and he doesn't expect me to understand
> physics (and God knows, not fluid dynamics) the way he does. We speak in a
> kind of pidgin. It's okay.
>
> Tangentially, one of my favorite tee shirts has a bit of the Navier Stokes
> equation on it. People without any knowledge of physics just laugh. (Idea
> is: Which part of .... do you not understand?) Physicists scrutinize my
> chest and eventually say (to a man): Uhm, there's a syntax error there.
>
> P.
>
>
> On Jul 5, 2011, at 10:35 AM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
>
> 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.
>>
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Doug Roberts
> drobe...@rti.org
> d...@parrot-farm.net
> http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins
> <http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins>
> 505-455-7333 - Office
> 505-670-8195 - Cell
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
>
> "In humans, the brain is already the hungriest part of our body: at 2
> percent of our body weight, this greedy tapeworm of an organ wolfs down 20
> percent of the calories that we expend at rest."
>
> Douglas Fox, Scientific American
>
>
>
>
> ============================================================
>
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
