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It’s a decent list but thermodynamics is introduced way too late in the list (after modern and quantum wtf) and fluid dynamics and fluid mechanics including aer
by kingkongjaffa 3y ago
It’s a decent list but thermodynamics is introduced way too late in the list (after modern and quantum wtf) and fluid dynamics and fluid mechanics including aerodynamics is entirely missing.
If you have a physics education (I have an engineering education) can you tell me if you can really get a physics degree without bumping into Bernoulli or Navier-Stokes?
At least just to see the lay of the land.
- elashri 3y agoI am writing my physics PhD thesis and I did not study fluid mechanics (other than the few chapters in the standard general physics). It will really be dependent on what is your physics field but you can definitely survive in physics without deep knowledge of fluid mechanics except when your study require it PS: I am a particle physicist.
- jwuphysics 3y agoA professor remarked that it was a bit sad that physics students nowadays have a better understanding of quantum field theory than fluid mechanics. He mentioned this while lecturing on QFT.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tekla 3y agoBut fluid mechanics is haarrddddd (Aeronautical Engineer). Compressible fluids can go suck it. I rue the day Navier-Stokes became a thing.
- bigger_cheese 3y agoAgreed, I studied Materials Engineering - Fluid Dynamics was one of the hardest subjects in my opinion. I liked thermodynamics it made sense to me, solid mechanics was a bit of a slog to get through (endless amounts of beam deflection) but fluid dynamics arrghh. I chose to take a particle physics course as an elective in my final year - I was planning to specialize in battery and capacitor technologies and wanted to learn more. The lectures were very different to Engineering much, much more theory focused(almost nothing on applications) it was my introduction to things like Hamiltonians, Wave Functions and Fermi-Dirac statistics. I'm glad I took the course I learnt a heap especially about semi-conductors it gave me a better appreciation and understanding of things we covered in my engineering degree like magnetism and phonons/heat transfer as well. But I will say it did feel like another world compared to Engineering - there was much less in common than I would have thought.
- paulpauper 3y agoat least fluid mechanics in the context of engineering is only 3 dimensions. QFT needs more.
- elashri 3y agoThere is a more practical reason for that. QFT has become essential to learn for many Condensed matter physicists. And they always are with particle physicists which will span most of the physics community, at least comparing with whose work involve in-depth knowledge of fluid mechanics. Not to mention that QFT seems easy in comparison.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoThat is a very "pure physics" way to approach physics, and I think it's right if you want to build up the underlying principles. That was how my college taught physics, and it helped to make many otherwise unintuitive parts of thermodynamics understandable. Also, physicists don't necessarily include fluid dynamics as a core discipline. It is almost mechanical engineering to them. I'm not surprised to see it missing.
- Avshalom 3y agoI have a B.S. Physics from NMT graduated in 2009 (they changed some of the courses a year or two after my cohort) but the main series progression was Modern Physics -> Waves -> Classical Mechanics, E/M/Optics -> Quantum -> Thermo. Never really did much of anything fluids-wise other than some viscosity/drag stuff in Mechanics
- carabiner 3y agoNS is too applied and seems akin to including the beam equation.
- kingkongjaffa 3y agoWould you also say Maxwell's equations are "too applied"? They're both pretty firmly physics things rather than applied or engineering things, in their purest forms...
- btrettel 3y agoI've noticed before that "physics" as in what is taught for a physics degree has gaps which make little sense to me as a mechanical engineer. Continuum mechanics (including both fluid and solid mechanics) is unfortunately nearly entirely absent aside from some basic things like Hooke's law and Bernoulli's principle. In my view, what's taught for a physics degree is more of a historical accident than a selection of the most important principles. In an extraterrestrial civilization, the boundaries between engineering, physics, and chemistry may be entirely different. Dismissing Navier-Stokes as just a consequence of Newton's laws and thus unimportant can be extended further towards dismissing a large fraction of what's taught in physics degree programs. An undergraduate physics student may get more education on Bose-Einstein condensates (which are just a consequence of quantum mechanics :-) than they do on Navier-Stokes. The Navier-Stokes equations are a lot more important than Bose-Einstein condensates in my view.
- lanza 3y agoA physics undergraduate degree is different than a lot of degrees in that it's 100% incomplete for the purpose of training towards a real profession. Nobody hires physics bachelors. It's just the four year mark of your studies to be a 8+ year trained physicist. And for that purpose of being an intermediate degree to becoming a physics PhD, Navier-Stokes isn't relevant. You don't use it in most fields that are generating physics PhDs in the 2000s and beyond. There's only so much time to teach somebody in four years and there are significantly more important things that are also being left out (e.g. more thorough courses on group theory).
- btrettel 3y ago> You don't use [Navier-Stokes] in most fields that are generating physics PhDs in the 2000s and beyond. That's because physics degrees don't include much on fluid dynamics. If someone wants to get a PhD in fluid dynamics, they probably get a PhD in some variety of engineering. This goes back to what I said about the physics curriculum seeming weird to me, as it it's not about "physics" in itself. It's more a random selection of topics that exists for historical reasons. > There's only so much time to teach somebody in four years and there are significantly more important things that are also being left out (e.g. more thorough courses on group theory). In another comment, you said that you don't know what the Navier-Stokes equations are. Given that, I don't think you're in a good position to judge their value. I have a couple of group theory books myself, and I don't agree with your assessment that group theory should get priority over fluid dynamics.
- _dain_ 3y ago>can you tell me if you can really get a physics degree without bumping into Bernoulli or Navier-Stokes? Bernoulli principle was covered in my bachelor degree but Navier Stokes wasn't; true-blue fluid dynamics was either an optional course that I didn't take or a grad student course, I don't remember now.
- superposeur 3y agoAs a physicist, fluid mechanics was the most glaring gap in my undergraduate preparation, despite its centrality to most physics applications. Somehow it is always a “time permitting” topic at the end of an already-cramped curriculum. I first encountered the Euler equation in the context of GR — absurd. In another decade or two, I suspect its rightful place early in the physics curriculum will be emphasized.
- cli 3y agoThe order seems fine to me. Thermodynamics/statistical mechanics was taught as a junior level class at my undergraduate alma mater. During that year, students would take electrodynamics, classical mechanics, and statistical mechanics as separate classes in some loose order, although of course simpler versions of these topics would have been introduced in first year physics. The lack of fluid mechanics also, unfortunately, tracks with my experience.
- disentanglement 3y agoThermodynamics is usually (and rightfully so) taught together with statistical physics for which quantum mechanics is essential, so the order does make sense.
- lanza 3y agoFormer theoretical physicist here (quantum gravity). TBH I don't know what Navier-Stokes is.
- ghaff 3y agoConsider yourself lucky :-) Fluid dynamics and I never got along very well--probably mostly the math (partial differential equations mostly as I recall).
- paulpauper 3y agoagain, if you can get a good grasp of the differential equations of GR and QFT, then you can make the leap to other topics. it's not like starting from zero. there is a large base of knowledge
- dsqrt 3y agoI think this is, at least in part, specific to the US/Western tradition. US physics curriculum is built to get people up to speed with quantum physics ASAP, because this is the core of most physics research in US physics departments. If you look at Landau-Lifshitz's Theoretical Physics curriculum, you will find plenty of classical physics: from fluid dynamics, to elasticity, and plasma physics. For example, Landau-Lifshitz Vol. 6 is an excellent introduction to Navier-Stokes equations and their applications.