This has the same omission that my undergrad program had: continuum mechanics. Even just the very basics (pressure, velocity, etc in a moving, non-equilibrium system) and translating between the terminology used by different science and engineering fields (static pressure, total pressure, velocity pressure, stagnation pressure, hydrostatic pressure, dynamic pressure, plain old pressure, head, oh my!) is very useful.
Hydraulics are everywhere. Ever used a sink? Flushed a toilet? Contemplated an air filter? Felt both sides of a small fan? Wondered how, exactly, a utility pump causes water to go in the inlet and out the outlet, and tried to read the manufacturer’s spec? Contemplated that the ripples when you throw a rock in an actual pond really don’t resemble the average “look I made water in WebGL” animation very much?
And more fancily, and very much in “Physics”, cosmological models usually model the universe as being full of a spatially varying continuous fluid. Stars are plasma or weirder things, and those are fancy fluids.
Yet, for some reason, the basics are missing from “Physics”. You can sometimes find them in mechanical engineering departments, and Feynman covers it a bit in his lectures.
Hydraulics are everywhere. Ever used a sink? Flushed a toilet? Contemplated an air filter? Felt both sides of a small fan? Wondered how, exactly, a utility pump causes water to go in the inlet and out the outlet, and tried to read the manufacturer’s spec? Contemplated that the ripples when you throw a rock in an actual pond really don’t resemble the average “look I made water in WebGL” animation very much?
And more fancily, and very much in “Physics”, cosmological models usually model the universe as being full of a spatially varying continuous fluid. Stars are plasma or weirder things, and those are fancy fluids.
Yet, for some reason, the basics are missing from “Physics”. You can sometimes find them in mechanical engineering departments, and Feynman covers it a bit in his lectures.