Length1h 44m
About this audiobook
Fluid dynamics is the science of everything that flows, and this book is a complete tour of it written without a single equation. It begins at the beginning: Archimedes in his bathtub and the law of buoyancy, Hero's steam toys, Torricelli's mercury column in 1643, and Pascal's barometer carried up a mountain to prove we live at the bottom of an ocean of air. It follows the subject's most productive embarrassment, d'Alembert's 1752 proof that ideal fluids exert no drag at all, through Euler's beautiful equations and the century of canals, capillaries, and blood-vessel experiments that gave the subject Poiseuille's law and the Navier-Stokes equations. At the center stands Osborne Reynolds and his 1883 dye experiment, which showed that flow has two faces, calm and wild, and gave science the single most useful idea in the field: the contest between inertia and viscosity that decides which face a flow wears.
Audiobook details
GenreEducation and Learning
Length1 hr 44 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateOct 22, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction
2Chapter 1: The First Flow
3Chapter 2: Newton's Crossroads
4Chapter 3: The Century of Water
5Chapter 4: Reynolds and the Two Faces of Flow
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6Chapter 5: The Grammar of a Flowing Fluid
7Chapter 6: Prandtl's Thin Layer
8Chapter 7: Laminar, Turbulent, and the Cascade Between
9Chapter 8: The Work of Vortices
10Chapter 9: The Airplane and the Air
11Chapter 10: Faster Than Sound
12Chapter 11: Water on the Move
13Chapter 12: Weather, Winds, and Other Worlds
14Chapter 13: Flow in the Body
15Chapter 14: Flow at Work and in the Machine
16Chapter 15: Flow Beyond Earth and the Open Questions
17Chapter 16: Fun Facts and Trivia, Graded Every trivia chapter in a fluids book has a heavy load, because this subject attracts more confident nonsense than almost any other, and it also hides some genuine surprises. Each entry here is graded: true, mostly true, false, or unproven, with the reasons given in plain words.
18Conclusion
19References: Fluid Dynamics
20Glossary
21About the Author
22Series Info
23Copyright
