* First, you asked a question that probably can't be answered, even with the most powerful, sophisticated tools available to us today.
Doug, At the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center we had users who modeled the Gulf Stream and the formation of tornadoes. The latter, Kelvin Droegemeir, monopolized our biggest machines every morning in June to predict, with some success, the locations of that afternoon's tornadoes in Oklahoma. Is it really too difficult to model water running out of a household sink? Wasn't that Nick's question? Frank From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2011 2:01 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Experiment and Interpretation I must say Nick, that was a rather immature response, even by my standards. Let's look back at this thread for a moment: * First, you asked a question that probably can't be answered, even with the most powerful, sophisticated tools available to us today. * Several of us tried to explain why this was so. * Some of us joked with you. * You persisted, even implying that an unnamed few of us were being snobs by refusing to answer your simple little question. * We pushed back. * You left in a huff. Think about it for a bit... --Doug On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Nicholas Thompson <nickthomp...@earthlink.net> wrote: Ok. I got it. You guys don't want to talk about this subject, you don't want ME to talk about it, and nobody else really wants to talk about it. So, I declare this thread closed. Please don't post any more responses to this thread. You want to make off color remarks, find you own damn thread. N From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2011 1:05 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Experiment and Interpretation 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 <http://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 <http://www.friam.org/> -- Doug Roberts drobe...@rti.org d...@parrot-farm.net 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 -- Doug Roberts drobe...@rti.org d...@parrot-farm.net http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell
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