Partisan Science in America

Last Tuesday's edition of the Wall Street Journal featured an op-ed by Gary Saul Morson titled "Partisan Science in America".  Among the topics discussed are the origins of COVID-19, Dr. Fauci's pronouncements about masks and "attacks...on science", and climate change.  While DTLR does not take a position on the "lab leak" theory, which is discussed at the center of Morson's piece, in my view the rest of the article is on point.  Though Morson is a professor of Slavic languages and literature, according to Wikipedia he is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and had a youthful interest in physics.  Much of what he writes here is accurate, though sadly not well understood even by scientists themselves.

Here are some of the best lines of the piece:

If science is treated as a solid block, each part of which is as indubitable as all the others, then science has been misunderstood.  Science always contains some propositions less firmly grounded than others:  on the frontier, newly discovered, based on experiments not readily replicated.

and,

Some scientific statements prove false:  that's how science works.  Those who claim that to doubt any part of the consensus is to be "antiscience" or "a denier" are themselves being antiscientific.

and,

To doubt a scientist is not to doubt science.  Quite the contrary, personal authority is precisely what science dispenses with, as much as possible....To be sure, nonscientists often have to trust scientists to inform them what the science has discovered.  But that is all the more reason that scientists bear the responsibility of not letting political or other nonscientific criteria affect their explication.

and finally,

If scientists expect their statements to be trusted, they must themselves be trustworthy in making them.  One had better be scrupulously honest before asking people to surrender their own judgment and simply believe what they are told.  Scientists should be especially careful not to misrepresent political or policy judgments as being scientific.  And they must protest vigorously and loudly when other influential people claim to speak in the name of science while misrepresenting it.

I've heard multiple politicians say "I believe in science".  Anyone who makes such a statement has no understanding of the scientific process, as the first quote above alludes to.  This kind of talk pollutes our collective ability to think critically about science and science policy.  

 

That famous painting of Lavoisier

Any scientist who visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is brought to a halt by Jacque-Louis David's portrait of Antoine and Marie-Anne Lavoisier.  Chemistryworld has a post by Philip Ball this month about the discovery of what had been originally painted (and covered up).  Antoine Lavoisier was arguably the most pivotal figure in the history of chemistry.  Ball speculates that the painting was altered due to worries about Lavoisier's portrayal in light of the forthcoming French Revolution.  If so, the alterations were not sufficient to save Lavoisier's life--he was executed during the Revolution--though his wife did survive.  Check out Philip Ball's account.

An update on supersymmetry and competitors to string theory

About 12 years ago, I read Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics:  The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (Houghton Mifflin, 2007).  Like a few other physicists, Smolin was not pleased with the lack of evidential basis for string and M-theory, and the desire of some physicists to abandon the need for such empirical support.  Part III of the book looks at alternatives to string theory.  Though I am a physicist, I am as good as a layperson in this particular arena, and Smolin's book gave me a nontechnical discussion of string theory's competitors.

At the time Smolin wrote, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was still under construction.  Smolin predicted that the LHC would find the Higgs boson (it did) and that its biggest task would be to find evidence for supersymmetry.  Last month, The Economist featured an article that essentially gives an update on all this ("Bye, bye, little Susy", Aug. 28, 2021).  It's a refreshing look at the situation as it stands today.

First, hopes of finding evidence for supersymmetry ("SUSY") are slipping quickly.  While SUSY hasn't been ruled out entirely, evidence has been lacking so far.  Without SUSY, string theory is also near a dead end.  Meanwhile, experimental anomalies with the standard model are beginning to accumulate.  

The article describes a number of competing "theories of everything" to string theory.  In some, the very notions of space, time, and causality are emergent phenomena.  I find it exhilarating to read that statistical physics and information theory may play a fundamental role in the standard model's successor. When I audited an undergraduate thermal physics class while in grad school, the professor introduced the topic by saying that thermodynamics was more general than either mechanics or electromagnetism.  From the Economist article, perhaps thermodynamics may be more general than we ever had a right to expect!

Experimental physicists discovered the Top Quark not long after I began studying physics; the discovery of the Higgs boson and gravitational waves have been more recent experimental breakthroughs.  However I remember in grad school seeing the high energy theory professors publishing about SUSY.  Theoretical physics may have indeed been in a rut, as Smolin would have you believe, during much of my professional lifetime.  The competitors to string theory discussed in the Economist article may be the first steps to a renaissance of theoretical physics.  If so, theoretical physics might get exciting again!

A tribute to McGraw-Hill's fluid mechanics books

Let's wrap up the current round of book publisher tributes with this look at McGraw-Hill's books on fluid mechanics.  Like Wiley discussed in the last post, McGraw-Hill published two widely used introductory fluid mechanics texts, the venerable one by Victor L. Streeter and coauthors, which seems to now be finally retired, and the more recent one by Frank M. White, just out in its 9th edition.  I have neither book, but their authors are represented in the following photo.

Some McGraw-Hill fluid mechanics books.

Streeter's Handbook of Fluid Dynamics was part of the publisher's Handbook series, which was quite prolific in its day.  It was joined in the series by McGraw-Hill's more recent Fluid Flow Handbook, edited by Jamal Saleh (2002), now also out of print.  White's Viscous Fluid Flow (2d edition above; the 4th edition came out this year) was part of McGraw-Hill's Series in Mechanical Engineering, as were the 7th edition of Schlichting (shown above), John D. Anderson's Modern Compressible Flow, Frank S. Sherman's Viscous Flow, and J. O. Hinze's Turbulence.  Also seen above is Katz & Plotkin's Low-Speed Aerodynamics, part of McGraw-Hill's Series in Aeronautical and Aerospace Engineering, which itself was once edited by Anderson.  Evidently a number of books in that series were cross-listed with the Mechanical Engineering Series.

The Brodkey & Hershey text seen on the right in the photo is a representative of McGraw-Hill's Chemical Engineering Series.  It must have been a flagship for the publisher, as the pre-title pages explain its history dating back to 1925.  It brags that the series "stands as a unique historical record of the development of chemical engineering education and practice.  In the series one finds the milestones of the subject's evolution:  industrial chemistry, stoichiometry, unit operations and processes, thermodynamics, kinetics, and transfer operations."  A few books in the series are still available from the publisher today.

The three books on the right illustrate the handsome livery of these engineering series, though Brodkey & Hershey's is hidden by the dust jacket.

A tribute to Wiley's fluid mechanics books

Let's now consider the fluid mechanics books published by John Wiley & Sons.  They are particularly strong in the markets for widely used engineering textbooks.  For instance, they publish the successors to both the Fox & McDonald and Munson, Young, & Okiishi introductory fluid mechanics texts, each on their 9th editions at the time of writing.  They also publish multiple texts in heat & mass transfer, including the classic Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot, pictured below.

Representative Wiley fluid mechanics books in my personal collection.

The Handbook of Fluid Dynamics and Fluid Machinery seen on the left was published in 1996.  It seems unlikely such a behemoth will ever be published again, by any publisher.  Gulf's Encyclopedia of Fluid Mechanics was published between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s, for a total of 13 volumes, probably setting the record for largest fluid mechanics reference work.  The most recent such reference work I know of is CRC Press's Handbook of Fluid Dynamics (2016), which appears in a single volume.

Ronald Panton's Incompressible Flow is a favorite upper-level textbook, now in its fourth edition.  The red and white livery of the second edition, seen above, reminds me of the similar livery of its Wiley sibling, Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics 2/e, which you can see in this earlier post.  Also seen above is Lex Smits' introductory textbook, and the first of Hunter Rouse's 2-volume series of hydraulics texts.

Wiley keeps in print two classic monographs on waves:  J. J. Stoker's 1957 Water Waves:  The Mathematical Theory with Applications (currently available as a Wiley Classics Edition, but also in a much less expensive Dover reprint), and G. B. Whitham's 1974 Linear and Nonlinear Waves, published as part of Pure and Applied Mathematics: A Wiley Series of Texts, Monographs and Tracts.  Similarly, Wiley has several key books on gas dynamics, including Zucrow & Hoffman's two volume Gas Dynamics (1976), and the more modern Zucker & Biblarz, Fundamentals of Gas Dynamics, now in its 3d edition (2019).  Marcello Lappa has published two monographs with Wiley:  Thermal Convection (2010) and Rotating Thermal Flows in Natural and Industrial Processes (2012).

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.