Ajit R. Jadhav's blog

Special note:

This is a long post; it covers a dilemma I'm facing right now; but there is no real ``masaalaa'' to it; so, if you aren't a researcher yourself, leave it alone.

Background:

Today, I received this email from some one at Neptune consultants in Pune [^], through Naukri.com [^].

Hello, World

Here is a document that jots down, in a brief, point-wise manner, the elements of my new approach to understanding quantum mechanics.

Please note that the writing is very much at a preliminary stage. It is very much a work in progress. However, it does jot down many essential ideas.

I am uploading the document at iMechanica just to have an externally verifiable time-stamp to it. Further versions will also be posted at this thread.

In introducing the very concept of the stress tensor to the beginning student, text-books always present only indirect relations involving the concept. Thus, you have the relations like "traction = (stress-transposed)(unit normal)" (i.e. Cauchy's formula, for uniform stress), or the relations for the coordinate transformations of the stress tensor, or the divergence theorem (for non-uniform stress). These are immediately followed or interspersed with alternative notations, and the rules for using them.

But what you never ever get to see, in text-books or references, is this: a *direct* definition of the stress tensor, i.e. an equation in which there is only the stress tensor on the left hand-side, and some expression involving some *other* quantities on right hand-side. Why? What possibly could be the conceptual and pedagogical advantages of giving a direct definition of this kind, and its physical meaning? I would like to ponder on these matters here, giving my answers to these and similar questions in the process.

The context is the finite difference modeling (FDM) of the transient diffusion equation (the linear one: $\dfrac{\partial T}{\partial t} = \alpha \dfrac{\partial^2 T}{\partial x^2}$).

Two approaches are available for modeling the evolution of $T$ in time: (i) explicit and (ii) implicit (e.g., the Crank-Nicolson method).

It was obvious to me that the explicit approach has a local (or compact) support whereas the implicit approach has a global support.

I am creating this blog entry to have my confusions about gradients, vectors, and deformation gradient, etc., straightened out once (and hopefully for all time!) ... My confusions got exposed (even to me) while commenting on a thread started by Prof. Suo here [^]. In particular, I realized my confusions after writing this comment [^] there.

A few points that might be of general interest:

1. The dates: The date of Huygens' first written down material, which was orally presented to the French Academy of Sciences, is 1678---in contrast to the oft-quoted date of 1690. 1690 was the year of the first, French, publication of these notes (plus other material) in the form of a book.

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.

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.

Hi all,

Just thought that the following paper archived at the arXiv yesterday could be of general interest to any mechanician:

Xingyu Zhang, Matthew Tomes, Tal Carmon (2011) "Precession optomechanics," arXiv:1104.4839 [^]

The fig. 1 in it makes the matter conceptually so simple that the paper can be recommended to any mechanician for his general reading, and not only to a specialist in the field.

--Ajit

[E&OE]