Fluid Flow and Turbulences

Abstract

What are physicists good for? Well, it depends on the field in which they are specialists. Some can make a night romantic by telling you a lot about stars and galaxies. Others might be able to fix your car or your TV. But what they should all have in common is to be able to calculate the movements of objects if they know the forces acting on them. This is something fundamental that they learn during their first mechanics lectures. If you follow the rules of Newtonian mechanics, you can treat objects as something point like and get, as a first approximation, a good result. Just to mention a few practical examples: You let an apple fall down a well. If you stop your stopwatch at the point at which you hear it hitting the ground you can calculate how deep it is. You can also calculate how to defeat an enemy in a judo fight who is bigger and stronger than you. Or you can calculate the perfect angle to hold your garden hose if you want to reach the flowers which are the furthest away from you (45 degrees). Feel free to think of further applications of the 45 degree solution.