- Euler was the first mathematician to derive the equations, for an inviscid fluid, conserving mass and momentum. First person to express Newton’s law (for a point mass) for the case of a continuous medium, he could do so by (in the words of Truesdell):
looking within the interior moving fluid, where neither eye nor experiment may reach, he called upon the “imagination, fancy, and invention” which Swift could find neither in music nor in mathematics
and somehow he imagined that the fluid parcels can be treated as discrete, connected, small bundle, so tiny that experiments can’t prove or disprove it, still yield a mathematical theory which is consistent with many hydraulic experiments
My philosophical take: Truly pointed so, I believe that there are a lot of things which
upon imagination/abstraction has an immense power to unravel physical truths of nature, for brain is the abstract mirror of reality (Richard Rorty) and the problems we tend to solve, concerning outer reality, require a deep inner introspection or imagination. How one can imagine something about an act of imagining, is altogether a different conundrum (hard problem of consciousness).
Published by Saksham
Ph.D. graduate in fluid dynamics from the University of Cambridge
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