>
>
>--- 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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