Tom....
That's one of the problems with trying to quantify the many things which happen with a fly cast.
I have tried to wade through articles from the physics literature on individual elements of the cast......like those limited to the movement of the fly line alone and have ended up with multiple pages of calculus formulae, the details of which would boggle the mind.......still learned a great deal.
If you really wish to see some of these works, contact Bruce Richards at: bwrichards@xxxxxxx and ask him if he'd be kind enough to forward you some of the physics work on the behavior of the fly line during the cast which was published by Noel Perkins and him. Noel is a physics professor.....I believe he's at the U. of Mich.
I have spent time discussing some of these things with Noel and Bruce, and I assure you that they do use many of the words as we do, including the terms, "load", "loading", and, "unloading". They gave a very informative course on the physics of the fly cast, complete with graphic computer readouts engendered by the use of a device which measures angular change of the rod butt during the cast. They named it the, "Casting analyser" as I recall. This was given in the theater at the West Yellowstone conclave 2 years ago. They've expanded on this technology since then.
I purchased an interesting paper on fly line dynamics by Greg Spolek , another physics expert. (He's quoted in the fly casting literature, by Don Phillips and others.)
I have also done a private search of various works published in physics journals and have paid for copies of them. I can't forward those to you because I had to sign a copyright agreement to get them......a real pain....and not inexpensive, either.
Most of us are neither poets nor physicists....so our terms, while not always totally scientific, are generally understandable and usable. I really think that I would turn off most of our members if I described things in mathematical terms. Fortunately, I'm not qualified to do that !
Having said all that, I applaud your inquiring mind.....and don't want to discourage your progress in this direction.
Gordy
From: "North Fork Flies - Tom Cooper" <cooper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: "North Fork Flies - Tom Cooper" <cooper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Gordon Hill" <hillshead@xxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: THE TERM, "WORK"
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:53:08 -0500
Gordy, I would love to see the dynamics of the cast expressed in an equation. Not being a mathematician, I have no idea if it would be expressed in Newtons, Ergs, Dynes, Joules or Watts. I imagine the loading phase would be expressed in one form while the post stop phase in another. I tried to go to the link for MIT's Physics of fly casting to see what they might have but found the link to be broken. We strive to use unified terms in our teaching language and I believe "loading" and "unloading" are terms that satisfy the "poet", But what do I say to that pesky need-to-know techno wiz? Wouldn't a unified, simplistic _expression_ of the types of work done and when satisfy the engineering mind as well as make it easier for us to be on the same page? This string might be a great example of STYLE. Folks might be thinking apples and apples while style has them expressing apples and oranges. Frankly, it has me slapping my forehead while yelping "Doy!"Tom CooperI went to UNC's Dictionary of Units of Measurement page http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/index.html and found this unit that might be your brick theory.joule (J) the SI unit of work or energy, defined to be the work done by a force of one newton acting to move an object through a distance of one meter in the direction in which the force is applied. Equivalently, since kinetic energy is one half the mass times the square of the velocity, one joule is the kinetic energy of a mass of two kilograms moving at a velocity of 1 m/s. This is the same as 107 ergs in the CGS system, or approximately 0.737 562 foot-pound in the traditional English system. In other energy units, one joule equals about 9.478 170 x 10-4 Btu, 0.238 846 (small) calories, or 2.777 778 x 10-4 watt hour. The joule is named for the British physicist James Prescott Joule (1818-1889), who demonstrated the equivalence of mechanical and thermal energy in a famous experiment in 1843. Although Joule pronounced his name "jowl", the unit is usually pronounced "jool" or "jew'l". Walter....
You may be right. In using the, definition of "WORK" to mean application of energy over time, my thought process went this way:
If I apply X amount of energy to move one brick one foot, I've accomplished Y amount of work.
If I apply that same amount of energy per brick to move 10 bricks the same distance, then I figure I've done 10 times that amount of work.....but it took me 10 times the amount of time to do that.
Problem with that line of thinking is that I might have elected to move all 10 bricks at the same time, which makes your argument and defeats mine.
Webster's unabridged dictionary has 45 different definitions for the word, "WORK", with numerous subdefinitions !
Gordy