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?
I'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.
A 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).
> 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.
The physics curriculum prepares people to do research on stuff that is published in "physics journals". You may not think that should be the goal but it is. Doing work on Navier-Stokes lands you in a math journal on PDEs.
On a more important note, the actual topics are completely irrelevant. What's important is learning to "think like a physicist". That's what has value even for those who don't go on to do academic research, which is most students. For any given physics topic that is relevant to real-life applications, there are engineers who actually know how to use it, something that would be ridiculous to expect from the superficial treatment a physics degree has to give any one topic.
Fluid dynamics is published in physics, engineering, and math journals, even if focused specifically on Navier-Stokes.
To do fluid dynamics research in a physics department, sometimes one has to spin it in some way that people with physics degrees care about. For example, saying that it's to understand chaos 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.
It was an exaggeration given that it never came up during my studies once. And I think that's a fantastic assessment of their value that I made it through most of a decade of studies without having to know a thing about fluid dynamics.
> 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.
...why? You're commenting on a physics line of education here. We don't use fluid dynamics and we extensively use group theory.
You are missing my main point. Physics education tends to exclude fluid dynamics, so of course you wouldn't hear much about it or do research in it if you only have physics degrees. If a physics degree were about physics as defined in the dictionary, fluid dynamics would be more prominent. But "physics" as studied in a "physics" department is much more narrow than the dictionary definition.
Fluid phenomena is ubiquitous. You live in a fluid. You probably drive a car through a fluid and may occasionally take a plane through a fluid at higher speed. You surely use plumbing. I don't see how you can claim that fluid dynamics is not valuable given that. It's a lot more relevant to most people than quantum mechanics.
Physics education focuses on exciting areas of research. There isn't much interesting work currently taking place in fluids. We consider it a solved problem. The fact that we drive cars through fluids is completely irrelevant.
I 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.
I 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
A 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.
Agreed, 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.
There 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.
That 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.
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.
As 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.
>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.
I 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
Thermodynamics is usually (and rightfully so) taught together with statistical physics for which quantum mechanics is essential, so the order does make sense.
Consider yourself lucky :-) Fluid dynamics and I never got along very well--probably mostly the math (partial differential equations mostly as I recall).
again, 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
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.