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G I Taylor – An Amateur Scientist
Geoffrey Ingram Taylor made outstanding contributions to the mechanics of fluids and solids spread over about 60 years starting in 1909. He was both an experimenter and theoritician of distinction.
Born on 7 March, 1886 in London to Margaret and Edward I Taylor, Geoffrey had a quiet and contented childhood. His father, an artist, worked at home and could devote time to Geoffrey and his brother, and often took them to the countryside and river. Taylor seems to have inherited his extraordinary talents from his mother’s side which constisted of many members ‘showing a clear disposition to independence and originality’. His grandfather George Boole originated Boolean algebra; George Boole’s father, though a common cobbler, was interested in mathematics and in making optical instruments; aunt Alice, an amateur mathematician, worked on four dimensional geometry.
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Sir G I Taylor As I Remember
My memory of Sir G I Taylor goes back to the year 1970 when I was at Caltech. At that time I was a PhD student of P G Saffman who had earlier worked with G I Taylor at Cambridge. It was announced that Taylor would be visiting Caltech to deliver a seminar on low Reynolds number flows at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratories (GALCIT) . I was particularly excited about the seminar as I had earlier done some work on the effect of compressibility at low Reynolds number as a part of my PhD dissertation. I had heard of Taylor’s work at Cambridge. Taylor had the reputation of being a scientist with extraordinary physical insight into problems of fluid mechanics. During the war, he had correctly calculated the yield (total energy release) of the first American atomic explosion based only on a time tagged sequence of photographs of the explosion released by US Government for publicity purposes and freely available at that time. He used dimensional arguments in arriving at the expression for the temporal development of the fireball and by comparing it with estimates from the photographs, arrived at the correct value for the yield of the explosion – a figure which was closely guarded secret at that time.Taylor had also done pioneering research in low Reynolds number flows, flow instabilities, turbulence, and flows in rotating systems. He was a good sailor and invented and patented a novel anchor which was much more effective for its weight than earlier types.
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