a physics question

[caraher]

22. I'm surprised that prompted heated debate

I think any high school student who had studied physics before around 1960 would have the answer readily, but these professors probably never studied fluid mechanics.

I read that the study of fluid mechanics in the US physics education program died by accident. In the early '60s Halliday and Resnik's text became a standard at the university level, and when they chose content they basically skipped fluids as, at the time, physics-ready college students had by and large received a good understanding at the high school level. Then the folks who write standards for high school physics looked and saw that the colleges didn't include the topic in their textbooks and dropped it from the high school curriculum. And so with the exception of adding some elementary fluids for pre-med oriented physics classes, instruction in fluid mechanics at the undergrad level was largely left to the engineering curriculum.