--- Justin Schwartz <jkschw at hotmail.com> wrote: > It
always
> >surprises me how much stick people like Irigaray
> got
> >for pointing out that if the development of science
> >hadn't been so utterly driven by the need to fling
> >heavy objects in trajectories, we might have more
> of a
> >theory of viscous flows.
>
> Actually, there is an intrinsic reason we don't have
> a theory of viscous
> flows. Classical mechanics is much easier,
Surely to crikey, "easier" isn't an intrinsic property of mathematical entities (blah, blah, NP-hardness; that's not relevant here). What is and isn't difficult in mathematics depends on the notation used, and I seem to vaguely remember that the Skoelem Lowenheim theory proves this to be the case.
> although
> the math gets very hard
> when you have even three bodies in play (hence the
> "three body problem").
> The underlying insights are simple, but the
> application is desperately hard.
> With fluid mechanics, we are still largely clueless.
> We can't even write
> down most of the equations, except in a sort of
> empirical, phenomenological
> sort of way. Fluid mechanics has little predictive
> power.
I think you're attributing too much of this to intrinsic mysteriousness and not enough to lack of effort. When the subject of desigining efficient propellors and turbines became germane, the whole theory of fluid mechanics made a huge leap forward. Unsurprsingly, most of the work was done in the name of transporting large heavy objects in the direction of people you don't like.
> But if girls had
> started doing physics with an intense interest in
> viscous flows, they would
> have faced the same problems. I suppose they might
> have invented chaos
> theory earlier, but you still need calculus to do
> that,
But if your fundamental theorems of calculus are developed to solve viscous flow problems, you're going to end up with a calculus that looks very different notationally from Newton's. Perhaps one in which it would be very difficult to plot cannonball trajectories.
dd
===== “It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances and to profess a conventional respectability which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men” -- JM Keynes
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