If you have a physics education (I have an engineering education) can you tell me if you can really get a physics degree without bumping into Bernoulli or Navier-Stokes?
At least just to see the lay of the land.
In my view, what's taught for a physics degree is more of a historical accident than a selection of the most important principles. In an extraterrestrial civilization, the boundaries between engineering, physics, and chemistry may be entirely different.
Dismissing Navier-Stokes as just a consequence of Newton's laws and thus unimportant can be extended further towards dismissing a large fraction of what's taught in physics degree programs. An undergraduate physics student may get more education on Bose-Einstein condensates (which are just a consequence of quantum mechanics :-) than they do on Navier-Stokes. The Navier-Stokes equations are a lot more important than Bose-Einstein condensates in my view.
And for that purpose of being an intermediate degree to becoming a physics PhD, Navier-Stokes isn't relevant. You don't use it in most fields that are generating physics PhDs in the 2000s and beyond.
There's only so much time to teach somebody in four years and there are significantly more important things that are also being left out (e.g. more thorough courses on group theory).
That's because physics degrees don't include much on fluid dynamics. If someone wants to get a PhD in fluid dynamics, they probably get a PhD in some variety of engineering. This goes back to what I said about the physics curriculum seeming weird to me, as it it's not about "physics" in itself. It's more a random selection of topics that exists for historical reasons.
> There's only so much time to teach somebody in four years and there are significantly more important things that are also being left out (e.g. more thorough courses on group theory).
In another comment, you said that you don't know what the Navier-Stokes equations are. Given that, I don't think you're in a good position to judge their value.
I have a couple of group theory books myself, and I don't agree with your assessment that group theory should get priority over fluid dynamics.
It was an exaggeration given that it never came up during my studies once. And I think that's a fantastic assessment of their value that I made it through most of a decade of studies without having to know a thing about fluid dynamics.
> I have a couple of group theory books myself, and I don't agree with your assessment that group theory should get priority over fluid dynamics.
...why? You're commenting on a physics line of education here. We don't use fluid dynamics and we extensively use group theory.
Fluid phenomena is ubiquitous. You live in a fluid. You probably drive a car through a fluid and may occasionally take a plane through a fluid at higher speed. You surely use plumbing. I don't see how you can claim that fluid dynamics is not valuable given that. It's a lot more relevant to most people than quantum mechanics.
On a more important note, the actual topics are completely irrelevant. What's important is learning to "think like a physicist". That's what has value even for those who don't go on to do academic research, which is most students. For any given physics topic that is relevant to real-life applications, there are engineers who actually know how to use it, something that would be ridiculous to expect from the superficial treatment a physics degree has to give any one topic.
To do fluid dynamics research in a physics department, sometimes one has to spin it in some way that people with physics degrees care about. For example, saying that it's to understand chaos theory.
It will really be dependent on what is your physics field but you can definitely survive in physics without deep knowledge of fluid mechanics except when your study require it
PS: I am a particle physicist.
I chose to take a particle physics course as an elective in my final year - I was planning to specialize in battery and capacitor technologies and wanted to learn more.
The lectures were very different to Engineering much, much more theory focused(almost nothing on applications) it was my introduction to things like Hamiltonians, Wave Functions and Fermi-Dirac statistics. I'm glad I took the course I learnt a heap especially about semi-conductors it gave me a better appreciation and understanding of things we covered in my engineering degree like magnetism and phonons/heat transfer as well. But I will say it did feel like another world compared to Engineering - there was much less in common than I would have thought.
Also, physicists don't necessarily include fluid dynamics as a core discipline. It is almost mechanical engineering to them. I'm not surprised to see it missing.
Also stating the equation isn't the same thing as studying it.
Thermodynamics/statistical mechanics was taught as a junior level class at my undergraduate alma mater. During that year, students would take electrodynamics, classical mechanics, and statistical mechanics as separate classes in some loose order, although of course simpler versions of these topics would have been introduced in first year physics.
The lack of fluid mechanics also, unfortunately, tracks with my experience.
I first encountered the Euler equation in the context of GR — absurd. In another decade or two, I suspect its rightful place early in the physics curriculum will be emphasized.
Bernoulli principle was covered in my bachelor degree but Navier Stokes wasn't; true-blue fluid dynamics was either an optional course that I didn't take or a grad student course, I don't remember now.
They're both pretty firmly physics things rather than applied or engineering things, in their purest forms...