Read Original Scientific Books: Why even the old ones can be better?

In today’s world of rapid digital summaries, AI answers, and neatly packaged textbooks, the original scientific books, especially older ones, might seem outdated.

But in reality, these classic texts carry unique intellectual values, here’s why:

1. Originality Sparks Creativity and Future Thinking
When a scientific idea is presented from scratch, built from first principles and logical reasoning, it helps the reader see the path of its evolution clearly towards creativity.

The human mind can better extrapolate and extend ideas to the further steps when we know from where and how has been started.

2. Nowadays, it is difficult to extract valuable original knowledge from huge contents, thousands pages information mixed with so many examples and applications, also mixed with weak and miss-information. The original references books can provide essential fundamentals on certain topics better.

3. Precision and Care in Pre-Digital Era Texts
In the 20th century, before the widespread use of personal computers and online tools, scientific writing demanded deep thought, hand calculations, and intellectual rigor. Authors invested significant effort in structuring, refining, and communicating complex ideas with clarity.

These books weren’t just written to the market, they were written to read.

4. Some examples of Classics Original Books in Fluid Dynamics, Transport Phenomena and CFD that shaped scientific thoughts and engineering applications:

– Transport Phenomena of Byron Bird, et al. (1960): One of the most powerful book for all engineers and researchers ( https://lnkd.in/e8hc725j ), a unique book for integrating fluid dynamics, heat and mass transfer, considering both microscopic and macroscopic scales.

-Fluid Mechanics Books White, Fox, Munson and Cengel, I introduced here: here: https://lnkd.in/ex6nU_Gg

– Heat Transfer of Holman (1963): One of the best book to start heat transfer towards advanced thermal engineering (https://lnkd.in/e3fEGEcJ)

– A First Course in Turbulence by Tennekes and Lumley (1972 , https://lnkd.in/ey8QEsSZ

– Numerical Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow of Patankar (1980)
One of the best to start CFD Code programing, FVM for solving Navier–Stokes equations ( https://lnkd.in/eeJFPtZA ).

– CFD Book of Anderson (1995, Basics with Applications)

– Finite Difference CFD Book of Hoffmann https://lnkd.in/euVjnwt5

– Finite Volume CFD Book of of Versteeg and Malalasekera (1995)

Remark: By reading original scientific books, we inherit that mindset. We don’t just learn science, we learn how to think like a scientist.

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