A tribute to Springer's fluid mechanics books

We're on a roll!  Let's now consider the fluid mechanics books published by Springer-Verlag.  They are a prolific publisher with footprints in nearly every subfield of fluid mechanics.  Let's start with some classics.  Today Springer publishes the current editions of some iconic books that originated with other publishers.  Ludwig Prandtl's Essentials of Fluid Dynamics was first published in English in 1952 by Blackie & Sons in the UK and Hafner in the U.S.; its original German publisher in 1931 was Vieweg, I believe.  The current (3d) English translation of the 12th German edition is published by Springer in its Applied Mathematical Sciences series (vol. 158).  Incidentally, vol. 5 of the same series is another classic, Fluid Dynamics by Richard von Mises and Kurt O. Friederichs (1971).  Finally, Boundary-Layer Theory, edited by Hermann Schlichting, was first published in 1954 in German by G. Braun; its English translation was previously published in the McGraw-Hill Series in Mechanical Engineering.  However the current (9th) edition (co-edited by K. Gersten) is published by Springer.

Of course, the monumental Handbuch der Physik, edited by S. Flugge, was also published by Springer.  Volume VIII was on fluid mechanics, while Vol. III covered classical and nonlinear continuum mechanics.

Here are a few other Springer fluids books in my personal collection.

A sample of Springer-Verlag fluid mechanics books in my personal collection.

Stanisic's book appeared in Springer's Universitext series, while Brekhovskikh & Goncharov's is Vol. 1 of the Springer Series in Wave Phenomena.  Chorin & Marsden's classic text appears as Vol. 4 in the series Texts in Applied Mathematics.  Constantinescu's book appears in Springer's Mechanical Engineering Series, while Rieutord's appears in the series Graduate Texts in Physics.  Other classics include Langlois' Slow Viscous Flow, Daniel D. Joseph's two-volume Stability of Fluid Motions (which appeared in the now-defunct series, Springer Tracts in Natural Philosophy), and Swinney & Gollub's edited Topics in Applied Physics volume, Hydrodynamic Instabilities and the Transition to Turbulence.  Students of hydrodynamic instability will also note Chossat & Iooss' The Couette-Taylor Problem, and Schmid & Hennigson's Stability and Transition in Shear Flows, both of which appeared in the aforementioned Applied Mathematical Sciences series as vols. 102 and 142, respectively.  The current (4th) edition of Marcel Lesieur's Turbulence in Fluids appears in Springer's Fluid Mechanics and its Applications series.

A tribute to Oxford University Press's fluid mechanics books

Here I will continue my series of tributes to book publishers in fluid dynamics with a look at Oxford University Press.  Their books in this field have an impressive pedigree, beginning with the 1938 publication of the 2-volume Modern Developments in Fluid Dynamics:  An Account of Theory and Experiment Relating to Boundary Layers, Turbulent Motion and Wakes.  This cornerstone in the history of fluid mechanics was written by the Fluid Motion Panel of the U.K.'s Aeronautical Research Committee, later renamed the Aeronautical Research Council of Great Britain, and collaborators, and edited by Sydney Goldstein.  These books were reprinted in 1965 by Dover.  In 1951, the Council saw the need to amplify the original volumes, and added Modern Developments in Fluid Dynamics:  High Speed Flow (1953), also in two volumes, written by the Council's Fluid Motion Subcommittee, and collaborators, and edited by Leslie Howarth.  Oxford published all four of these volumes in its Oxford Engineering Science series (which is confusing to me, because they apparently had another, later series of the same name, which I wrote about previously).

Instead of continuing in the Oxford Engineering Science series, a new series was then planned by the British Aeronautical Research Council: The Fluid Motion Memoirs, also published by Oxford's Clarendon Press.  As far as I know, two volumes were published:  Incompressible Aerodynamics:  An Account of the Theory and Observation of the Steady Flow of Incompressible Fluid past Aerofoils, Wings, and other Bodies (1960), edited by Brian Thwaites, and Laminar Boundary Layers:  An Account of the Development, Structure and Stability of Laminar Boundary Layers in Incompressible Fluids, together with a description of the Associated Experimental Techniques, edited by Louis Rosenhead (1963).  A volume on turbulence was commissioned, but I'm not sure if it was ever published.  I also don't know if the Fluid Motion Memoirs continued beyond these volumes.

Meanwhile, in 1961, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar's Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stability appeared in Oxford's International Series of Monographs in Physics.  This book was a landmark in the literature of hydrodynamic instability, and remains in print by Dover.  

With the superb foundation established by the publication of the above, Oxford has continued to contribute to the literature in this field up to the present.  I already mentioned McComb's turbulence monograph in an earlier post.   Oxford has another book on the subject of turbulence by P. A Davidson (whom we also met my post about the Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics).  Here are some other Oxford fluid mechanics books in my personal collection.

Some fluid mechanics books published by Oxford University Press.

The introductory texts by Acheson and Lighthill are classics, as is the monograph by Tritton, all pictured above. Acheson's text appears in the Oxford Applied Mathematics and Computing Science Series.  Tritton's and Lighthill's books feature the livery of Oxford Science Publications, though Lighthill's is also included in the Institute of Mathematics and It Applications Monograph Series as its Volume 2.  The text by Bruus shown above belongs to the Oxford Master Series in Condensed Matter Physics.

A tribute to Cambridge University Press's fluid dynamics books

Extending the theme from the last post, let's examine Cambridge University Press's books in fluid mechanics.  I daresay that nowadays, they are the foremost publisher in this field.  In addition to the books discussed below, they publish the foremost journal in the business, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.  

Of course, many of Cambridge's fluid mechanics books have appeared in the "red" series Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics, already discussed in the last post.  Let's begin this one with a snapshot of some of their non-series books in my personal collection.

Cambridge University Press fluid mechanics books in my collection.

The books by Batchelor, Lamb, and Drazin & Reid pictured above are acknowledged classics.  To that list I should add George Batchelor's The Theory of Homogeneous Turbulence (1953, second edition 1970), C. C. Lin's The Theory of Hydrodynamic Stability (1955), and Waves in Fluids (1978) by James Lighthill.  In the more contemporary era, the turbulence texts by Stephen B. Pope (Turbulent Flows) and Mathieu & Scott (An Introduction to Turbulent Flow) are notable, as is the 2004 A Gallery of Fluid Motion, which features a selection of award-winning photos from the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics' so-named annual competition.  Cambridge also has multiple books in transport phenomena and astrophysical fluid dynamics.

Of particular note is their series, Cambridge Monographs on Mechanics and Applied Mathematics, which began in 1952.  Many of the entries are now long out of print, though the series continues to be active today, with the next volume scheduled for publication next year.  I'm not sure how many total books have appeared in the series, but the "Applied Mathematics" part of the series' title has been dropped for some time.  Like the Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics "red series" discussed in the last post, the titles and authors in this series are notable; in fact many are shared with that series.  Both series range beyond just fluid mechanics, but I'll focus on fluid mechanics in this post.  Here are the volumes from that series in my personal collection.

Family portrait of the Cambridge Monographs in Mechanics and Applied Mathematics in my personal collection.

Like the "red series", these books have a uniform livery:  dark blue hardcovers, with green dust jackets; the paperbacks have green covers mimicking the hardbacks' dust jackets.  For this reason I refer to them as the "green series" in contrast to the "red series".  Aside from those pictured, other notable entries include Buoyancy Effects in Fluids, by J. S. Turner, The Structure of Turbulent Shear Flow, by A. A. Townsend, The Fluid Mechanics of Large Blood Vessels, by Tim Pedley, and Magnetoconvection, by N. O. Weiss and M. R. E. Proctor.  The Drazin & Reid monograph, Hydrodynamic Stability, shown in the first photo above, originally appeared in the "green series" as well; sadly its reprints do not feature the green livery of its siblings.

A tribute to Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics

Last December DTLR had a series of posts in tribute to the publishers of classic physics and atmospheric science books, and followed up in April with a post on the Oxford Engineering Science series.  Today I'd like to honor a famous series in applied mathematics, the Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics.  As far as I can tell, the series began in December 1987 with Maximum and Minimum Principles by M. J. Sewell.  By the time I began grad school in 1995, there were barely over ten volumes in the series.  I am delighted to see from the publisher's website that there are now nearly 60 volumes in the series, and it is still going strong, with the most recent entry issued earlier this year.  Nearly all of them remain in print, though in one case a superseded first edition is only available in electronic form (specifically, P. A. Davidson's An Introduction to Magnetohydrodynamics).  The familiar red livery of the series has been maintained with minimal changes since its beginning.  

The list of titles and authors is supremely impressive, and it would be an honor to be published in this series.  Here I'll only mention some of the contributors of more than one volume.  Philip G. Drazin was one prolific contributor, with texts on Solitons (with R. S. Johnson), Nonlinear Systems, and Introduction to Hydrodynamic Stability.  Grigory I. Barenblatt contributed Scaling, Self Similarity, and Intermediate Asymptotics, a text named simply Scaling, and most recently Flow, Deformation, and Fracture.  Johnson also has a book on water waves, and E. J. Hinch has a pair of contributions:  Perturbation Methods and Think Before You Compute.  He is also a series editor, and other series editors have contributed themselves too.  For example, Mark J. Ablowitz has Complex Variables (now in second edition with co-author A. S. Fokas) and Nonlinear Dispersive Waves.  Editor John R. Ockendon contributed Viscous Flow (authored with his wife Hilary) and Applied Solid Mechanics (authored with Peter Howell and Gregory Kozyreff).

As a theoretical fluid dynamicist, my personal collection of books from this series is heavily weighted toward that topic, but I own only a fraction of the available texts even in that subtopic.  Unlike previous posts in this series, this is the first one where I can say I had the pleasure of asking some of the authors to sign my copy of their books - specifically the Ockendons' Viscous Flow (I met them both at the same conference) and Charlie Doering's Applied Analysis of the Navier-Stokes Equations (coauthored with J. D. Gibbon, whom I have not met).  Many years later, I was stunned to discover that Doering and his students cited one of my research papers in their work.  I first became aware of their interest when I attended an APS Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, on a lark one year (I had long since ceased to be active in the field).  I had dropped in on a session related to my old stomping grounds, and midway listening to one of the students' talks, I realized he was discussing a paper I had coauthored!

A family portrait of Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics in my personal collection.

Some news on solar physics

This week's Physics magazine from the American Physical Society features an interesting article by Marric Stephens about an apparent anomaly - a contradiction between theoretical expectations and observational data regarding the sun's sodium D1 absorption line.  Stephens reports on a new paper by a Swiss/Spanish/German team that resolves the paradox by replacing a seemingly reasonable assumption:  that "the anisotropic radiation field that pumps the atoms of the solar atmosphere was assumed constant with wavelength over the very small spectral interval spanned by the nearby hyperfine structure components of both the sodium $D_1$ and $D_2$ lines."  The authors Ballester, Belluzi, and Bueno apply a theory of polarized radiative transfer that takes "into account the detailed spectral structure of the radiation, together with the effects of magnetic fields of arbitrary strength and elastic collisions in a realistic atomic model including [hyperfine structure]" .  There is a link to the paper itself, which is open source.  A nice tale of resolving an apparent conflict between theory and observation.

Reference

Ballester, Belluzi, and Bueno, 2021, Phys. Rev. Lett. 127:  081101.

Steven Weinberg 1933-2021

The world has lost one of its great theoretical physicists, Dr. Steven Weinberg, 1979 Nobel laureate.  Weinberg was also a great writer, authoring a series of influential textbooks, as well as works for the general public.  DTLR has always been admirer of his general writing.

The New York Review of Books, to which he was a longtime contributor, has made this 2001 essay by him available for reading in his honor.  I strongly recommend it.

The proton radius puzzle and the hazards of combining data from multiple studies

If journalism is a first draft of history, Physics World writer Edwin Cartlidge has done a superb job this month of reporting on the "Proton Radius Puzzle" and the pitfalls of combining data from multiple studies.  Cartlidge's piece is also a superb case study of a phenomenon described by David Bailey a few years ago.

Over time, a number of experiments around the world, using different physical principles, attempted to measure the radius of the proton.  An international group, CODATA, has the task of compiling all such data and basically reporting the community's best estimate.  This is done by first voting on which studies should be included; then the data are simply (weighted) averaged; presumably the weights are determined by the error bars reported by the individual studies.  The thus combined estimate, it is hoped, will have a more accurate point estimate, and narrow error bars, than any of the individual findings.  The former chair of the CODATA group working on the proton radius is quoted in Cartlidge's article arguing that this process incorporates all "individually credible results" but passes no judgment on whether each of those results is "right or wrong", a task that "would require superhuman powers".

Well, for about eight years, the measurement by the CREMA experiment, using a unique muon-based principle, was excluded from the average, as it was an outlier compared to other reports (in exactly the sense that Bailey has described).  However, in the interim, other groups using the more conventional approaches started to obtain results comparable to the lower value given by CREMA.  In 2018 CODATA finally incorporated the outlying results, though the stated error bars for the combined estimate had increased, unsurprisingly.  See Cartlidge's article for the twists and turns of the story.

DTLR's interest here is in the whole concept of combining data.  Something like this is widely practiced in statistics, under the name "meta-analysis".  I consider this poor practice, because it sweeps under the rug potential systematic errors in the individual results.  In the proton radius case, Cartlidge even seems to suggest that groupthink might have been at play in the CODATA decisions.

Here is DTLR's opinion about combinging data from multiple studies.  Don't do it.  Instead of meta-analysis, the individual study results, with their error bars, should simply be displayed together.  Users should be directed to critically review the study design, execution, analysis, and reporting of the individual studies, seeking out differences among them.  Authors of systematic reviews should use their judgment and discuss the similarities and differences, without blindly pooling all the data together.  Cartlidge writes, "the CREMA result was not really at odds with individual spectroscopy experiments – all but one differed by no more than 1.5 standard deviations, or σ. The only significant disparity – of at least 5 σ – arose when the conventional data were averaged and the error bars shrunk. But that disparity could only be maintained if the muon result itself was kept out of the fitting process – given how much it would otherwise shift the CODATA average towards itself."  My interpretation is that the artificial task of combining the data drove the source of confusion; this would have been avoided by simply presenting all the individual study results separately.  The field has clearly not reached sufficient maturity for a combined "best" estimate to be meaningful, in my opinion, and this is probably even more true of the meta-analyses often reported in the medical and public health literature.

Just days after Cartlidge's article came out, another one authored by him was published that also has combining data at its heart.  This one was about gravitational waves, but the story is complicated even further by the waveform modeling required to interpret gravitaitional wave signals.