A physicist at FEDSM2026

Every once in a while I blog about some conferences that I attended, such as the 2018 Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Diego, the 2023 American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting in Las Vegas, and the 2024 APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) Meeting in Salt Lake City.  I'm now adding to this series by discussing my attendance at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Fluids Engineering Division (FED) summer meeting (FEDSM) in Bellevue, WA.  FEDSM2026 also celebrates the centennial of the FED, an anniversary I mentioned earlier this year.  For most of the year I wasn't sure if I would be able to attend, but I finally registered in late June.  The conference ran from July 26-29, 2026, and met concurrently with ASME's Summer Heat Transfer Conference (SHTC) and its Energy and Sustainability (ES) Conference.  Attendees were allowed to cross-attend most events in all three meetings, and the reception and two of the lunches were communal among all three.

Bellevue is on the other side of Lake Washington from Seattle, and I flew into SEA-TAC airport on Sunday July 26.  I had been to Bellevue once before, to visit Bellevue Square for dinner with friends.  Bellevue Square was within walking distance of the conference venue.  I had a chance to take a walk through Bellevue's Downtown Park, and nearby Meydenbauer Bay Park that afternoon, before returning to the conference venue (the Hyatt Regency) for the evening reception.  Tragically there was a mass shooting over in Seattle that occurred during the Bite of Seattle event at Seattle Center that very evening.  Those of us at the reception were blissfully unaware of the tragic events that unfolded that evening.

The first regular day of the meeting, Monday the 27th, was the day I was most looking forward to.  It began with an outstanding plenary talk by Prof. Alfred Soldati (TU Wien), on "Bubble and Drop Breakup in Turbulence."  He was also the recipient of this year's ASME Fluids Engineering Award, the division's highest award.  I'll skip ahead and mention the final plenary talk of the meeting, on Wednesday morning the 29th, on "Particles in Liquids:  Collisions, Stress, and the Legacy of R. A. Bagnold" by Prof. Melany Hunt of CalTech. Both of these talks focused on multiphase flows, and were outstanding.  Not only was the research presented extremely interesting, it was presented very well by both speakers.  Unlike some of the routine technical talks, these plenary talks were well organized and easy to follow -- I would even say riveting.  I could imagine either talk being presented at APS-DFD, as they addressed fundamental issues.  My complements to FED for selecting these plenary speakers.

Returning to the first day, Prof. Soldati's keynote was followed by the FEDSM town hall, a sort of annual report on the division.  As this was my first attendance at FEDSM (and only second at an ASME-only conference), I found it very informative.  FEDSM is an annual event, but every four years (including 2027) instead of co-meeting with SHTC and ES, they co-meet with the Japanese and Korean mechanical engineering societies in Asia, at an event known as AJK.  However, FEDSM does sponsor tracks in the SHTC/ES joint meeting back in the states. Finally FEDSM sponsors tracks at the annual international ASME meeting, called the IMECE (International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition).  I also learned that FED sponsors two journals, the Journal of Fluids Engineering and the Journal of Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty Quantification.  The current lead editor of JFE is D. Keith Walters of the University of Arkansas, and the current lead editor of VVUQ is Aaron Koskelo of Los Alamos National Labs (who could not attend the conference).  There were at least 260 registrants of the conference, though there were certainly a lot more than that number present, due to the co-meeting with SHTC and ES.  Even so, the combined conference still felt smaller than APS-DFD.  Another sign of this is that there were hardly any exhibitors at this meeting, and no separate exhibit hall.  Rather, the large open space in front of the ballrooms served as the exhibit space (I counted only 3-4 exhibitors) as well as the reception area and the registration area.  The above photo looks down the hall through this space.  The photo below shows part of the hotel lobby, with the ballroom area visible on the second floor.

I was eager to attend the two sessions on Fluids Education, one scheduled before lunch, and one after.  They did not disappoint.  One of the speakers, Prof. Ivana Milanovic of U. Hartford, gave an informative talk on the history of fluids education in the U.S., during the afternoon session. There was also a memorable joint presentation by Profs. Aarthi Sekaran (SUNY Poly) and Sarah Beetham (Oakland U.) on a very crafty experimental flow visualization project they incorporated in their classes.  The morning session had a focus on artificial intelligence (AI), a topic that came up in nearly every side-conversation I had, whether at lunch or at the reception.  The morning session keynote by Prof. Ganesh Raman (California State University's assistant vice chancellor for research) described how his university system was implementing AI at university-scale.  The afternoon session ended with a presentation by a very precocious high school student.

Later that afternoon, I attended a memorial session for Frank White, a major figure within the FED (for example, he was once lead editor of JFE), as well as the University of Rhode Island.  He is known worldwide as the author of acclaimed textbooks in fluids and heat transfer.  Finally, I ended the day by attending the Energy and Sustainability Power Hour, which was kind of like a networking/focus group session.  It was quite fun.  Indeed, the networking opportunities here, at the reception, and all three lunches, were an unexpected highlight of the meeting. Because of its smaller size, I interacted with far more attendees on a personal level than I usually do at APS-DFD.

I ended the evening with a very late dinner at Din Tai Fung, which was right across the street from the hotel (shown above), sampling (among other dishes) their famed Xiaolongbao, shown below.

There were so many tempting restaurants in the immediate area, that I felt as if I were missing out on all the places I didn't have the time to try!  This Din Tai Fung was the third I have eaten in, having previously visited the ones in Santa Monica, CA, and Taipei, Taiwan (in the 101 Taipei skyscraper).

I allowed myself to sleep in on the morning of Day 2, having been severely sleep deprived for the previous two nights in a row.  Thus I missed that morning's keynote, which I did not regret, as I observed the speaker take a phone call during someone else's talk later that day.  How rude!  On Day 2, I began flitting in and out of the regular technical sessions, which I continued to do in the late morning of Day 3.  The awards lunch was held on Day 2, and I even got to have a small slice of the FED centennial birthday cake!

Based on the photo of the uncut cake that FED posted on LinkedIn, it appears that my piece captured part of the "E" in ASME, under which was written "Setting the Standard".  So the "AR" is from the end of "Standard".

I attended an afternoon plenary talk by Joseph Katz (Johns Hopkins), like Frank White, a former lead editor of JFE and textbook author.  His talk was titled "Turbulent Boundary Layers over Complex Surfaces" (see below).

I ended Day 2 by attending a panel session at the SHTC on "Modern Insights into Computational Fluid Dynamics".   Unfortunately I could not make much sense of it, as I had missed the panelists' individual presentations because I was at the Katz plenary.  I managed to catch the end of the panel discussion, but it was less useful to me than I had hoped.  That evening I had dinner at Fogo de Chao, the Brazilian steakhouse, within walking distance of the hotel.  On the way there I observed what appeared to be a pro-Ukraine protest on a street corner.  The concierge at my hotel gave me a coupon for a free dessert at Fogo de Chao; here is a shot of my key lime pie:

On Day 3, the day began with a panel session on the "Past, Present, and Future of Fluid Mechanics".  The panelists and their focus were, in order, Professors Ted Heindel (Iowa State University) on experimental fluid mechanics, Zhonquan Zheng (Utah State University) on computational fluid dynamics, and Francine Battaglia (U. of Buffalo) on fluids education.  The moderator was the conference chair, Prof. Ning Zhang (McNeese State U.).

Here are the panelists, conveniently sitting in the order in which they spoke:

The panel session was followed by Prof. Melany Hunt's plenary, which I discussed above.  I then attended a technical session, and joined the third and final lunch.  Unfortunately I had to catch a plane, so I headed back to the airport and missed the Rising Stars plenary session that ended Day 3.  It was perhaps regrettable that I was so busy chatting to folks at my table at the lunches, that I completely missed out on the poster sessions.

Conference papers are already posted on the ASME website, and there is supposed to be a special issue of JFE next August (yes, a year from now) with papers from this year's conference.  However, the division promises to have special centenary articles in forthcoming issues of JFE and Mechanical Engineer magazine later this year.  Finally, unlike with the 2023 APS March Meeting, I used the ASME meeting app without any difficulties at FEDSM2026.  

I would like to add that the meeting hotel, the Hyatt Regency, was very impressive.  Every staff member I interacted with was unfailingly nice and helpful.  They even made special hotel room keys for the conference, which I kept as souvenirs:

This was the first time I've seen a hotel make themed room keys, but I'm sure it won't be the last.  My stay was only marred on the last day by a partial power outage in my tower.

So, what did this physicist think?  I was glad to have attended the once-in-a-lifetime centenary meeting of the FED.  It nourished my soul.  I doubt I will have the means and opportunity to attend either the FEDSM or DFD annual meetings for a very long time, so it was particularly fortunate that I did have the ability to attend this year's centennial FEDSM (being in the western U.S. helps).  As I mentioned in my post on the 2024 DFD, the fluids specialty meetings are probably of lesser interest to me at this stage of my career than a larger meeting like the APS Global Physics Summit (formed form the merger of the March and April meetings).  There was definitely more of a focus on engineering research at FEDSM than I have seen at DFD.  On the other hand, this being a smaller meeting (even accounting for the fact that three different conferences were meeting together) allowed me far more face-to-face networking than I usually do at either APS DFD or the March Meeting.  This, despite that I did not meet a single person that I knew from beforehand.  In summary, I had a great time at FEDSM and in Bellevue, but it's unlikely I'll be able to go to another FEDSM (or DFD) for a very long time.

 

The debasement of the scientific literature

The debasement of the scientific literature is the collective result of many factors, such as:

• Incentives to publish in quantity rather than in quality, such as the use of impact factor to assess research merit.
• Sloppy and poorly documented methodology, leading to non-reproducible research.  Some of this is due to poor scientific education.
• Paper mills.
• Networks of authors who conspire to cite each others' works, inflating citation counts and impact factors.
• Poor editing by journal editors.
• Cursory, lazy, narrow-minded, and/or selfish peer reviewers.
• Predatory journals.
• Artificial intelligence slop.
• Scientific fraud.

Now Nature has thrown the lid open on yet another such factor, "review mills".  These are peer reviewers who produce lazy peer reviews (often reproducing identical prose across hundreds of reviewer reports) and demanding citation to their own work.  Writer Katarina Zimmer and data visualizer Andreion de Castro released this groundbreaking interactive article a few days ago to document this phenomenon, which I had not been previously aware of.  However I do not find it in the least surprising.  I won't regurgitate details here; their article is a bombshell and you should read it.

This year I was asked to peer-review an article that I had discovered had been extensively plagiarized.  The journal's editorial policy claims they check submissions against a plagiarism database, but evidently this had not been done before the manuscript was sent out for peer review.  The publisher was Springer-Nature.  Other commercial publishers (especially MDPI in a case study examined in detail) are implicated in the "review mill" problem discussed in the article by Zimmer and de Castro.  Thankfully I've never been published in an MDPI journal, as I've never had a high impression of that publisher, and I've been lucky that none of my coauthors over the decades has ever entertained publishing in their journals.  However, I have been published by Springer and the other major commercial publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Sage) as well as a good number of nonprofit ones.

As my scientific career may be drawing to a close, I may personally not have to deal with the debasement of the literature for much longer.  However, I remain a consumer of the literature, and find it disheartening.

Physicists on US postage stamps: Robert Goddard

Here I am continuing the series of posts on physicists and astronomers on US postage stamps, including the first, second, and third posts, plus one on chemists.  (I have also covered mathematicians in this series.)

In the very first post I mentioned some aviation pioneers also depicted on US postage stamps; among them was Robert Goddard, who appears on an 8 cent airmail stamp issued in 1964.  I just discovered that his Ph.D. was in physics, so he can officially be considered among the physicists so honored!

 

What about chemists on US postage stamps?

In my last post, I mentioned I couldn't think of any chemists on US postage stamps at the time, though I mentioned discovering a stamp for Harvey Washington Wiley.  This was due to ignorance on my part.  To set the record straight, in addition to Wiley:

• In 1940, Charles W. Eliot appeared on a 3 cent stamp in the Famous Americans series. 
• In 1947, Thomas A. Edison appeared on a 3 cent stamp, on the 100th anniversary of his birth.  (His first lamp had been celebrated earlier, on a 2 cent stamp in 1929.) 
• In 1948, George Washington Carver appeared on a 3 cent stamp, in the same format as the 1940 Famous American Scientists issue (which originally featured no physicists, astronomers, chemists, or mathematicians).  He later appeared on a 32 cent stamp issued in 1998, part of the Celebrate the Century - 1910s series.  I believe this gives him the honor of being the only chemist to have appeared on 2 different US postage stamps.
• In 1954, George Eastman appeared on a 3 cent stamp, celebrating his 100th birthday. 
• In 1983, Joseph Priestley appeared on a 20 cent stamp, celebrating his 250th birthday.
• In 1993, Percy Lavon Julian appeared on a 29 cent stamp, in the Black Heritage series. 
• In 2009, Linus Pauling (Nobel laureate in both chemistry and peace) and biochemist Gerti Cori (Nobel laureate in physiology/medicine) both appeared on 41 cent stamps in the American Scientists issue of that year, its second such issue.
• In 2011, Melvin Calvin and biochemist Severo Ochoa, both Nobel laureates (in chemistry and medicine/phyisology, respectively), appeared on Forever stamps in the third and final American Scientists issue. 

Finally, in 1988 a physicist associated with Xerox, Chester Carlson, appeared on a 21 cent stamp in the Great Americans series. I should have mentioned him earlier.

Once again, I'm grateful to the website of the Mystic Stamp Company, as well as stampworld.com, and finally this article:

L. R. Caswell, 1990:  American chemists and physicists on postage stamps.  Journal of Chemical Education, 67 (10):  842-847.

 

 

Physicists and astronomers honored on US postage stamps: another update.

I previously blogged (2021) about physicists and astronomers honored on U.S. postage stamps, with an update last year here.  It's time for another update, not because any new stamps of interest have been issued, but because I have learned of two other stamps that I should have mentioned in my original post, along with a few other notable finds.

First, in 1973, the 500th anniversary year of his birth, Polish astronomer Copernicus appeared on an 8 cent stamp.  He is a major figure in the history of science, and the only one of those mentioned in this series of posts that did not live in the United States at some point during their life.

Second, in 1988, aviation pioneer Samuel P. Langley (along with his Aerodrome #5) appeared on a 45 cent airmail stamp.  He was an astronomer, mathematician, and physicist.

While I find it odd that I couldn't think of a single chemist honored on a postage stamp (but see below), the American Chemical Society has twice been so honored:  in a 1951 three-cent stamp celebrating the ACS's diamond jubilee, and a 1976 thirteen-cent stamp celebrating their centenary.  Similarly, the American Society of Civil Engineers was honored on the centenary of its founding with a 3-cent stamp in 1952.  This was preceded by another 3-cent stamp in 1950 honoring the Railroad Engineers of America.  This stamp features "Casey" Jones, and was issued on the 50th anniversary of his death. 

"The Sciences" were honored on a 5-cent stamp in 1963, celebrating the centenary of the founding of the National Academy of Sciences, whose first president was a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin.  In 1983, "Science and Industry" was honored on a 20-cent stamp, issued on the 50th anniversary of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.

In 2018, a set of four Forever stamps were issued in honor of STEM education.  They honored Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

Since I've spent time in the pharmaceutical industry, I will also note that in 1956, a 3-cent stamp honoring the 50th anniversary of the Pure Food and Drug Act was issued, which features Harvey Washington Wiley, a major driving force in the passage of that law, and an official at the USDA agency that was a predecessor to the modern Food and Drug Administration.  So, I found at least one chemist after all!

At some point, I hope to find and scrutinize a history of every postage stamp issued by the United States Postal Service, to see if I can find any others of note.

Once again I'm grateful to the website of the Mystic Stamp Company.

On the history of the AMS AOFD conference

In an earlier post celebrating the 100th anniversary of the ASME Fluids Engineering Division, I expressed some confusion about the history of the American Meteorological Society's Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics Conference.  I wondered if it had not always been called by that name.

Indeed, the first Conference on Atmospheric and Oceanic Waves and Stability was held in 1976 in Seattle, WA; with the second in 1978, held in Boston, MA.  The 10th was held in Big Sky, Montana in 1995. For the 11th conference in 1997 in Tacoma, WA, the name changed to the Conference on Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics, a name that has stuck ever since.  I'm not sure at what point the meeting became annual rather than every 2 years.

Anyway, the conference is 50 years old this year, another celebration worthy of note!

 

 

Can't stop blogging about book reviews!

My last post commented further about book reviews in the physics community.  An announcement today that the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) has appointed a new editor for its MAA Reviews has reminded me that the mathematical community is doing relatively better on the book review front than the physics community is.  I don't read MAA Reviews regularly, but I see that it is a professional-society sponsored source of curated book reviews.  They also feature a Basic Library List, a downloadable spreadsheet which includes books they recommend for college and university libraries.  The list is annotated with a star system, with 3 stars for books considered essential, 2 stars for strongly recommended, 1 star for "recommended", and zero stars for "suggested".  I haven't examined the list in detail, but conceptually this seems to be a good idea, and quite useful for students and self-learners as well.

More broadly, I can't speak to the quality of MAA Reviews, as I'm not a regular reader, but the concept seems like exactly what I think is missing in the physics community.  As a bonus, all the content seems to be freely available online.  Unfortunately, using the search feature I was able to find only a single reviewed book in the field of fluid mechanics, and only 3 under physics.  Its coverage of statistics is not at all comprehensive, with only 6 books showing up in the search feature for statistics, 6 more for probability, with 3 more under probability theory, two under "Statistics and Probability", one more under Bayesian statistics, one each under classification and clustering, one more under data visualization, and one more under data analysis.

The Basic Library List has much better coverage, but no reviews are attached to the entries.  Looking at the fluid mechanics sections of the list, I count only 13 titles included, of which only two are rated at 3 stars (essential), both by James Lighthill:  his Waves in Fluids and Informal Introduction to Theoretical Fluid Mechanics.  Both are excellent choices that I would agree with.  There are no 2 star recommendations, but earning a single star are Acheson's Elementary Fluid Mechanics, Lamb's Hydrodynamics, Courant and Friedrichs' Supersonic Flow and Shock Waves, Stoker's Water Waves, and a book I'd not heard of until now, Gary Sod's Numerical Methods in Fluid Dynamics.  Aside from that last one, I would consider the rest as classics.  A 14th book, Batchelor's Introduction to Fluid Dynamics, also a classic, appears under "Mathematical Physics:  Fluid Mechanics".  However there are quite a few other classics that should have been included, many of which were written by physicists or engineers.  So, in execution the list might not live up to my expectations, but I suppose opinions about books are always subjective, so that no such list would make everyone happy.

In addition to MAA, I am a member of SIAM (the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), and their SIAM Review (a journal sent to all members) maintains a healthy book review section.

Anyway, perhaps the physics community needs a source of free, online, curated book reviews in the spirit of MAA Reviews, to replace the fallen books section of Physics Today.  A professional society might be a good central place to host one.