You need the damn physics
Published:
Hey how are you doin, Hello down there! Geez, coming here after two months- that’s the big reason I decided to write a blog rather than podcast. I would be too lazy to work on preparing a podcast and check if I am not going round the bush in circles, then record it properly without a text or a call and then post it on soundcloud/spotify-that’s way too much trouble!
Well, last time we talked my semester was about to start and now it has and it has been a mixture of dopey and dull. I have been enjoying my two courses but fear the exams encircling them. I am taking courses offered by the Math department and one of them is something I want to talk about today. The course is named Math in Fluid Dynamics and it teaches what I learnt in undergrad and grad aerohydro(the nightmare of last year’s Fall) from a mathematical point of view. And that is something I needed to ~talk~ ~rant~ talk about.
Back in undergrad, I used to love when professors talked in math. I rememer a professor who taught me fluid mechanics and hea transfer-using the absolute beauty of mathematics to teach us something we see regularly in real life. I hated school where we used to go over physics derivations without looking properly at math. My attraction towars CFD in general and turbulence modelling was driven by my love of math. Numbers tell us so much! I remember when I used to teach machine learning and deep learning to students, I used to remind them: don’t focus on the damn coding, you can import tensorflow as tf or debate about the frameworks. Think about the math behind it, it’s basic linear algebra combined with some critical thinking and that’s what is the magic! You have some matrices, you compute them using method and boom this helps a machine to recognize human language! That, that is something dopey. Prof. Feynman said, “To not know math is a severe limitation to understanding the world”
Back to the class, we were being taught about conservation of linear momentum in a mathematical way. I remember being taught this thing for around 2 classes with some of us(me) banging our heads to comprehend it.I told the same thing to my friend who is taking this course- the professor was explaining about g=9.8 m/s2 and I was telling him he is not telling us what it means, what this value means or what this law means. g=9.8 m/s2 is a mathematical constant for him but if you look at it from a physics viewpoint- you drop a ball from your first floor terrace in Seattle or from Mt. Everest or from your height in Sydney, the ball will have the same accelaration nevertheless the height or the place on Earth. And that means something! It is important to recognize the essence of g. Same for the conservation law- you have two balls colliding, a ball and a dough colling, the momentum will remain the same. And this physics explains the paramountcy of the law or any other physicl quantity.
Prof. Feynman switched to math during his initial years to MIT and then to physics realzing “he had gone too far”. And I think he was right- it is great to understand the beauty of math but you need to look at the flow physics too to understand it better. You can’t just go on with the pure math portion and ignoring the fluid physics. You need to know what these terms and equations stand for. And you don’t need to think this math as derivations you need to cram too(that would kill the fun in it!) We need to appreciate the physics and the mathematics involved in the process and comprehend it to understand the finest tapestries of nature.
That’s it for today! See you next time!