10 |
The ascent of humanity |
It’s Newton’s second law of motion in disguise. The left-hand side is the acceleration of a small region of fluid. The right-hand side is the forces that act on it: pressure, stress, and internal body forces.
It provides a really accurate way to calculate how fluids move. This is a key feature of innumerable scientific and technological problems.
Modern passenger jets, fast and quiet submarines, Formula 1 racing cars that stay on the track at high speeds, and medical advances on blood flow in veins and arteries. Computer methods for solving the equations, known as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), are widely used by engineers to improve technology in such areas.