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.
I am pleased to inform you that I will be defending my Ph.D. thesis, formally in mechanical engineering, at COEP, University of Pune, India, on the next Sunday (i.e. 20th September, 2009).
The title of my thesis is: "A New Approach to Computer Modeling and Analysis of Certain Fundamental Field Problems from Engineering Sciences."
Unlike other blog-posts of mine, I am not going "own" this particular thread. By that, I mean to say: I am going to only begin this thread and immediately turn it over to you completely. I am not going to watch over whether the discussion here continues to stick to its main theme or not, whether it slides into some minor side issues, whether it deserts the main theme altogether, etc., the way I usually do.
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This thread is meant to be about the following book:
If someone knows of books/articles dealing with the meaning of the concept of potential in physics (or concerning the physical bases underlying the energy methods of mechanics) then I would very much appreciate getting to know about these.
0. I was idly thinking about the current H1N1 flue pandemic, and the following things occurred to me. Please note, I know very little about this subject matter. So, please consider descriptions in the following as, at best, tentative.
1. There is a basic difference between how alcohol kills viruses and how salt-water kills bacteria. [Alcohol is used in the hand-cleaners they use in hospitals. Girgling with salt-water is the first line of defense (and an unexpectedly highly effective one) which is well known for millenia.]
(i) 3rd International Congress on Computational Mechanics and Simulation (ICCMS09) to be held this year at IIT Bombay, on December 1--5, 2009. Abstracts due by July 31, 2009:
http://www.civil.iitb.ac.in/help/114_iccms09/iccms09.html
(ii) 54th Congress of the Indian Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (An International Meet), to be held this year at the Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, New Delhi, during December 18--21, 2009. Abstracts due by September 30, 2009:
Ideally, this post of mine should carry a poll, but I guess as an ordinary user, I cannot insert one.
Currently, I am writing a small software program that is especially designed to help learn FEM. For instance, I will be providing detailed listings for every intermediate step, e.g. all those [D], [B], [k], etc. matrices for each element, as well as the final assembled global system {F} = [K]{d} and its solution separately at each Gauss point. Only linear static problems for the time being; will add transients/eigenvalue problems in near future.
The following is a (relatively minor) question which had occurred to me more than two decades ago. By now I have forgotten precisely when it was... It could have been when I was in my TE (third year engineering) at COEP. ... Or, perhaps, it was later on, when I as at IIT Madras (studying stress analysis on my own). ... I don't remember precisely when it occurred to me, only *how* it did---it was when I was poring over the first part of Dieter's book.
In the past few days at iMechanica, there have been quite a few messages dealing with different aspects of programming, libraries and so on...
It would perhaps be timely, therefore, to ask:
Do you have any opinion about using Java in numerical analysis (NA) / FEM / CFD etc.---i.e., in computational engineering and sciences (CES)?
Do you have any experience or hard data concerning performance of Java vis-a-vis C++ or FORTRAN, esp. for large systems, or for high-performance applications? Any pointers?
Please leave a note... Thanks in advance...
In the literature, FEM has sometimes been characterized as a local approach, but IMO this needs to be corrected.
The piecewise continuous trial-functions of FEM can be looked at from two different viewpoints: