Life at Low Reynolds Number

This is a talk that I would not, I'm afraid, have the nerve to give under any other circumstances. It's a story I've been saving up to tell Viki. Like so many of you here, I've enjoyed from time to time the wonderful experience of exploring with Viki some part of physics, or anything to which we can apply physics. We wander around strictly as amateurs equipped only with some elementary physics, and in the end, it turns out, we improve our understanding of the elementary physics even if we don't throw much light on the other subjects. Now this is that kind of a subject, but I have still another reason for wanting to, as it were, needle Viki with it, because I'm going to talk for a while about viscosity. Viscosity in a liquid will be the dominant theme here and you know Viki's program of explaining everything, including the heights of mountains, with the elementary constants. The viscosity of a liquid is a very tough nut to crack, as he well knows, because when the stuff is cooled by merely forty degrees, its viscosity can change by a factor of a million. I was really amazed by fluid viscosity in the early days of NMR, when it turned out that glycerine was just what we needed to explore the behavior of spin relaxation. And yet if you were a little bug inside the glycerine, looking around, you wouldn't see much change in your surroundings as the glycerine cooled. Viki will say that he can at least predict the logarithm of the viscosity. And that, of course, is correct because the reason viscosity changes is that it's got one of these activation energy things and what he can predict is the order of magnitude of the exponent. But it's more mysterious than that, Viki, because if you look at the Chemical Rubber Handbook table you will find that there is almost no liquid with viscosity much lower than that of water. The viscosities have a big range but they stop at the same place, I don't understand that. That's what I'm leaving for him…