When I am sick, I always have this dream. I wouldn't say dream exactly, but this mental state, where I am half awake, but I perceive the world so complicated that it tortures my mind. Literally, I feel tortured whenever I have this 'dream'. It's like my brain isn't big enough to comprehend whatever I am thinking of, and it is undergoing system errors.Imagine it this way. Look at your surroundings, resting on the bed, subconsciously aware of them. Everything looks normal. Then, everything suddenly zooms in, your line of sight remains the same, but suddenly, you start seeing things at the molecular level. And you start trying to make sense of each individual molecule working as a part of your surroundings. Thus, your brain now is filled with information the amount of molecules in your room. You are trying to imagine them as lego bricks, and someone at the back of your mind asks you to re-build your surroundings by stacking these molecules, like lego bricks.
Then, you feel so tortured that you fall asleep completely, but you are not let off. Now you float in space, and I cannot recall the details. As you know this happens when I'm sick and I'm sleeping, so I never manage to remember how exactly to describe this horrible feeling. Anyhow, it is a mental torture.
Trying to make sense of fluid mechanics compared to undergoing this sort of mental state is actually nothing. However, it would be good enough to describe fluid mechanics as its counterpart during my consciousness.
I am currently having enough problems in comprehension in very basic E&M, such as Gauss' Law. How I imagine fluid mechanics would work(I might be wrong) is a blend of vector calculus and chaos theory. After all, the vortices I see in pictures of fluid flow really remind me of strange attractors.
DISCLAIMER: Whatever you are going to see from here to there is most probably wrong
Here
Then one day this lecturer comes along, starts off by introducing the Taylor series, and starts deriving the expressions for divergence, vorticity and deformation by assuming there is already a function for the system of fluid flow. I can accept that, but how do you even model a function for the fluids in the first place?
Another thing that comes to my mind is that fluid behaves really weirdly and it seems that no two times will I exactly see my bowl of soup behaving the same way. This led me to think that fluid (especially at high speeds) can exhibit chaotic nature, and now even my only pillar for security, the function which we assumed we already know, becomes hazy.
And if you haven't noticed, we (or at least I) have no idea what is going on in vector analysis, as you can see on the chart. It is just mind boggling to imagine infinitely many vectors associated to every point in a field.
I have no idea whether what I said was correct, but to sum it all up, I 'learnt' fluid flow analysis in two pages of notes. In other words, I learnt practically nothing.
This are the 4 main nothings that we learnt in the lecture.
Divergence: The supposedly rate of area change
Vorticity: How fast it spins
Deformation: Squash squash squash
THERE
Although my understanding did not increase much, the lecturer then started talking about real life applications, and it FEELED like that I started to understand certain phenomena such as cyclones better on an extremely shallow level after an hour of exposure to fluid dynamic jargon and pictures.
I know I haven't. My feeling then was that this was a topic that I will never understand and learn in my life because it was too bizarre for the mind to contemplate. But again, this was the feeling I had when I was in primary school after being told that with something called Integration, you can find the PRECISE area of a mathematical shape without any error.
Here are some interesting videos my lecturer showed us. Don't ask me how they work.
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