Worlds of Flow: A history of hydrodynamics from the Bernoullis to Prandtl by Olivier Darrigol (PDF)

Description

The first of its kind, this book is an in-depth history of hydrodynamics from its eighteenth-century foundations to its first major successes in twentieth-century hydraulics and aeronautics. It documents the foundational role of fluid mechanics in developing a new mathematical physics. It gives full and clear accounts of the conceptual breakthroughs of physicists and engineers who tried to meet challenges in the practical worlds of hydraulics, navigation, blood circulation, meteorology, and aeronautics, and it shows how hydrodynamics at last began to fulfill its early promise to unify the different worlds of flow. Richly illustrated, technically thorough, and sensitive to cross-cultural effects, this history should attract a broad range of historians, scientists, engineers, and philosophers and be a standard reference for anyone interested in fluid mechanics.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “This is a book that all practising fluid dynamicists must read: I hope there will be a paperback edition soon, so that the strange history of the subject that Darrigol describes with such insight will become part of the intellectual legacy of interested students in engineering, mathematics and physics.”–Nature”This is a book that all practising fluid dynamicists must read: I hope there will be a paperback edition soon, so that the strange history of the subject that Darrigol describes with such insight will become part of the intellectual legacy of interested students in engineering, mathematics andphysics.”–Nature “This is a book that all practising fluid dynamicists must read: I hope there will be a paperback edition soon, so that the strange history of the subject that Darrigol describes with such insight will become part of the intellectual legacy of interested students in engineering, mathematics and physics.”–Nature “This is a book that all practising fluid dynamicists must read: I hope there will be a paperback edition soon, so that the strange history of the subject that Darrigol describes with such insight will become part of the intellectual legacy of interested students in engineering, mathematics andphysics.”–Nature About the Author Olivier Darrigol is Research Director at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France. His previous book, Electrodynamics from Ampere to Einstein (OUP 2000), won the Marc-Auguste Pictet prize of the Société de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle de Geneve in 2000. In 2004, he was awarded the Grammaticakis-Neumann prize of the French Academy of Sciences.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Olivier Darrigol has organized his history of hydrodynamics along topical lines rather than as a single narrative. A glance at the table of contents will show how this is done and quite effective it is. In each section the author goes in chronological fashion and continually compares the state of mathematical analysis with the often unsuccessful attempts to match that analysis to real fluid behavior. Parts of the book take us step by step through derivations in vector and tensor calculus leading to the Euler and Navier-Stokes formulations and other sections describe experimental techniques and the attempts to find a middle ground using empirical data to facilitate mathematical modeling of specific flow cases. Blind alley and dead ends are also described in a sympathetic enough way and all the major contributors are given positive roles.An interesting theme that emerges and is considered is the way the mathematical techniques of classical hydrodynamics were applied to all sorts of other areas of physics with mixed success. For example, at a time when the ether was thought to exist, some considerable intellectual investment was made to understand it in this way, to no ultimate avail.Although a working knowledge or at least a general familiarity with technical mathematics will help follow the text, it is not essential to be able to follow every detail of every integration to at least understand what this work looked like and meant. There is a helpful primary and secondary bibliography though a rather limited index. The illustrations, mostly from the works of the time, are numerous, well reproduced and helpful.This book forms an interesting comparison with Calero, The Genesis of Fluid Mechanics 1640-1780. Darrigol’s work covers a later and longer period, thought there is substantial overlap, and it benefits from being written in english instead of being poorly translated. Darrigol works hard to transform all older mathematics into modern notation, which has its benefits, though the approach of Calero in this regard may give a better flavor of what the work looked like.All in all, I really like this book and it is a five star effort though not perhaps a desert isle work. It should be understood that you should need to be more than casually interested in the subject to work you way through this detailed a treatment.

⭐Very good overview for the covered period, but don’t expect too much details. To study the proposed themes seriously, you have to consult a lot of the contained references, which, by the way, are very complete.

⭐This is written by an academic showing off to other academics. It is not for the general reader, even one versed in science.

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