Finding the Way Through Water - Price, Roland K.
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Finding the Way Through Water explores how water contributes to our understanding of the created world and our Christian beliefs. As an emeritus professor and an ordained priest in the Church of England, Roland K Price explores how water features in the Bible. Important at creation, water brings about global catastrophe, enables escape from slavery, ensures survival in the wilderness, prepares people for worship, and sustains warriors and exiles. Jesus turns water into wine, walks on water, stills the storm, has his feet washed with a woman's tears, and washes his own disciples' feet. You will…mehr

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Produktbeschreibung
Finding the Way Through Water explores how water contributes to our understanding of the created world and our Christian beliefs. As an emeritus professor and an ordained priest in the Church of England, Roland K Price explores how water features in the Bible. Important at creation, water brings about global catastrophe, enables escape from slavery, ensures survival in the wilderness, prepares people for worship, and sustains warriors and exiles. Jesus turns water into wine, walks on water, stills the storm, has his feet washed with a woman's tears, and washes his own disciples' feet. You will be surprised by the extent to which water pervades God's story in the Bible, and how an understanding of the management of water today can make this story available to all. Prepare to be challenged whether you are a water professional or a Christian wanting to know more about God's world today.
Autorenporträt
It is only right to give you, as reader, some indication of the reasons for my enthusiasm for water in the environment and its management. To do this, I describe here some particular experiences from my childhood, and subsequently from my student years and professional life. Like many children, my first enjoyable memories of water were at the seaside, attempting to build sandcastles that would defy the persistent encroaching waves, or of being turned upside down by breakers on the sandy beach. I welcomed the challenge of trying to dam streams in the Welsh hills or to skim flat stones across the river at Hay-on-Wye, where my paternal grandparents lived. But water at the seaside was not just an enjoyable experience. I became aware of the awesome power of water when news came of serious flooding from a disastrous surge in the North Sea along the East Anglian coast in 1953, and the unacceptable and devastating floods from the River Lugg invaded the lower part of Leominster, the small country town where I was brought up. Little did I realise then that these events would be seminal in forming the focus of my future career. In my last year at the local grammar school, I bought a book on physics that discussed the flow of fluids. This made me aware that there was some interesting mathematics undergirding the subject, but it seemed complicated and abstruse, depending on partial differential equations, which were then a considerable mystery to me. I was accepted to study maths at Cambridge, but it was not until my third year that I was able to begin to unlock the mysteries of fluid dynamics. My fourth year doing Part III of the Maths Tripos (the Cambridge equivalent of an MSc) was given over to a range of topics in fluids: aeronautics, magneto-hydrodynamics, meteorology, turbulence, open channel flow, oceanography, cosmology, etc. After some uncertainty, I resolved to do a PhD in fluid dynamics. One of the lecturers in the subject at Cambridge, Dr Ian Proudman, was appointed professor of mathematics at the completely new University of Essex, so I jumped at the chance of joining him as one of his graduate students in the autumn of 1964. For the first year, I explored the delights of Ekman layers in deep oceans and other strange phenomena, but these had been researched by others and I could not find a research problem that was potentially tractable. Then Prof Proudman suggested the topic of breaking waves. The die was cast, and I enthusiastically set to work. For the next four years, I looked at the problem from a range of different (mathematical) points of view. I spent hours on holiday at beaches fascinated and entranced by the waves curling over at the top and then 'breaking'. I would like to think that I made a significant contribution to the subject, but the problem is highly non-linear, and mathematical techniques for this sort of problem are very limited. Although I had done enough for a PhD, I needed a new approach to the problem. Solving the non-linear mathematical equations for fluid flow analytically, even under very simplified conditions, was virtually impossible. But there was another way of tackling the problem-using computers. These had become commercially available during the early 1960s, and the new University of Essex had an ICL 1900 series machine. My fellow research students and I began to see the possibilities of the electronic computer in helping us to solve our nonlinear equations numerically. So in 1967, with the aid of a fellowship, I began to solve my breaking wave equations on the computer. I managed to get to the stage where the wave was beginning to curl over: I had begun to conquer the process. But I was restless. Detailed numerical calculations of one breaking wave were interesting from a theoretical point of view, indeed, the calculations were fascinating. But what were the practical implications of this solution? I could not break my virtual wave against a virtual wall and look at the consequen...