Hi all,

1. In the past, we have had quite some discussion regarding both open-access and open-access journals. However the slant in this blog post is different. I am not concerned here much about open-access journals per say.

Here, I am concerned about the policies that the prominent commercial journals keep regarding posting preprints on the Internet before these articles are submitted to them. I would like to know about policies kept in this regard by the commercial journals in the fields of physics, mechanics, and engineering (including software engineering, computational science and engineering, etc.).

Equations are of central importance in all of science and engineering, but especially so in mechanics.

Even leaving aside algebraic equations, handbooks on PDEs alone list hundreds of equations. However, a few of these do stand out, either because they encapsulate some fundamental aspect of physics/science/engg., or because they serve as simpler prototypes for more complex situtations, or simply because they are so complex as to be fascinating by themselves. There might be other considerations too... But the fact is, some equations really do stand out as compared to others.

As announced on 5 Oct. 2010, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester won the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene". Geim and Konstantin first reported the experimental observation of graphene in 2004 .  Novoselov, 36, is also the youngest physics laureate since 1973.  

Job Title:Computational Geomechanics Job Summary:ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company has an immediate opening in Computational Mechanics for research scientist at our Corporate Strategic Research Laboratory. Our lab focuses on fundamental science that can lead to technologies having a direct impact on the oil and gas industry.

Here is an interesting link I came across while searching for the Feynman lectures -- Project Tuva.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/

It provides each of Prof. Feynman's seven lectures delivered at Cornell as a part of the Messenger lecture series. This format of posting lectures by Microsoft is absolutely amazing. I hope more such lectures especially videos of keynote lectures in leading conferences and congresses can be made available online.

-Arun

Since my research touches on the basics of QM, I have developed this habit of visiting arXiv.org every now and then. Last week or so, at arXiv.org, I found a couple of interesting articles on physics in general. I would like to share these with you.

It has been quite some time (more than 1.5 years) that I had touched upon the topic of the physical bases of FEM in general, and of the general weighted residual (WR) approach in particular, at iMechanica (see here).

The position I then took was that there is no known physical basis at all for the WR approach---despite its loving portrayals in mathematical terms, or its popularity.

Further, I had also expressed (here and elsewhere) that a basis in physical principles existed for FEM only in a rather limited sense: wherever the energy interpretation was available for the model. (Note, this too is already at variance with what some of the authors have written in books.)

One of the things that I've thought about often in relation to mechanics is:

 1)  There's a paucity of heroes. Growing up, my heroes were not mechanicians. Certainly not any of the mechanicians in the last 100-150 years. Physics has it's heroes: Feynman, Hawking, Einstein, Wheeler, Bardeen, Oppenheimer etc. etc.

Notes for Physics of Explosion

This has reference to (only) the *last paragraph* in Prof. Harry Lewis' recent post, found at: http://www.imechanica.org/node/1423#comment-2880.

The reason I write the present post is because I always seem to have had a view of inventing, learning, or teaching mathematics that is remarkably at odds with what Prof. Lewis' last paragraph *seems* to imply.

An interesting blog discussion on the disappearance of fundamentals from teaching in Universities was brought to my attention.  It serves as an interesting reminder that we who are educators in the University system must be ever vigilent in planning mechanics curricula and changes to curriculum.  Should we be offering courses in the area of this month's jClub, "Nanomechanics"?  Should we drop classical courses that have stopped being interesting to the majority of students (and thus attract low numbers)?  Should we educate students explicitly in biomechanics without providing them a classical mechanics background?  These are the questions we are likely to face in the next few years as change continues to sweep across the university system, especialy in the US but elsewhere as well.  I believe that we as a community have a responsibility here to ensure that the high standards of the discipline are maintained through teaching of fundamentals and the passing along of these values to future generations!