Fluid dynamics as a branch of physics

I must confess that I have never traveled 5000 miles before to make an after‐dinner speech, and I feel warmly appreciative about your having thought of me, 5000 miles away, when you were planning this occasion. To be sure, I know that the difference between an after‐dinner speech and any other kind of speech is just a trifle less marked in these longitudes than it is around the meridian of Greenwich, where one can rely on an audience half‐seas‐over in port and brandy instead of just recovering from the martinis. I was greatly impressed, for example, once at Brown University when a very good dinner indeed was fitted in as a sort of filling in a sandwich between two thick and stodgy talks in a certain adjoining lecture room on “Sound Generated Aerodynamically” and “Shock Wave Boundary Layer Interaction”. The audience stayed awake manfully, even in the inner viscous layers, and no snores were generated, aerodynamically or otherwise.