A groundbreaking textbook on twenty-first-century fluids and elastic solids and their applications Kip Thorne and Roger Blandford’s monumental Modern Classical Physics is now available in five stand-alone volumes that make ideal textbooks for individual graduate or advanced undergraduate courses on statistical physics; optics; elasticity and fluid dynamics; plasma physics; and relativity and cosmology. Each volume teaches the fundamental concepts, emphasizes modern, real-world applications, and gives students a physical and intuitive understanding of the subject. Elasticity and Fluid Dynamics provides an essential introduction to these subjects. Fluids and elastic solids are everywhere—from Earth’s crust and skyscrapers to ocean currents and airplanes. They are central to modern physics, astrophysics, the Earth sciences, biophysics, medicine, chemistry, engineering, and technology, and this centrality has intensified in recent years—so much so that a basic understanding of the behavior of elastic solids and fluids should be part of the repertoire of every physicist and engineer and almost every other natural scientist. While both elasticity and fluid dynamics involve continuum physics and use similar mathematical tools and modes of reasoning, each subject can be readily understood without the other, and the book allows them to be taught independently, with the first two chapters introducing and covering elasticity and the last six doing the same for fluid dynamics. The book also can serve as supplementary reading for many other courses, including in astrophysics, geophysics, and aerodynamics. Includes many exercise problems Features color figures, suggestions for further reading, extensive cross-references, and a detailed index Optional “Track 2” sections make this an ideal book for a one-quarter or one-semester course in elasticity, fluid dynamics, or continuum physics An online illustration package is available to professors The five volumes, which are available individually as paperbacks and ebooks, are Statistical Physics; Optics; Elasticity and Fluid Dynamics; Plasma Physics; and Relativity and Cosmology.

This book is about two special topics in rheological fluid mechanics: the elasticity of liquids and asymptotic theories of constitutive models. The major emphasis of the book is on the mathematical and physical consequences of the elasticity of liquids; seventeen of twenty chapters are devoted to this. Constitutive models which are instantaneously elastic can lead to some hyperbolicity in the dynamics of flow, waves of vorticity into rest (known as shear waves), to shock waves of vorticity or velocity, to steady flows of transonic type or to short wave instabilities which lead to ill-posed problems. Other kinds of models, with small Newtonian viscosities, give rise to perturbed instantaneous elasticity, associated with smoothing of discontinuities as in gas dynamics. There is no doubt that liquids will respond like elastic solids to impulses which are very rapid compared to the time it takes for the molecular order associated with short range forces in the liquid, to relax. After this, all liquids look viscous with signals propagating by diffusion rather than by waves. For small molecules this time of relaxation is estimated as lQ-13 to 10-10 seconds depending on the fluids. Waves associated with such liquids move with speeds of 1 QS cm/s, or even faster. For engineering applications the instantaneous elasticity of these fluids is of little interest; the practical dynamics is governed by diffusion, ·say, by the Navier-Stokes equations. On the other hand, there are other liquids which are known to have much longer times of relaxation.