I vaguely remember this being mentioned somewhere earlier when discussing about blender simulation capabilities but I thought to post this again.
This page has some of the most outstanding CG physics simulations I have ever seen demonstrated anywhere. Including fluid, rigid- and soft body and gaseous (smoke & fire) simulations, these videos are worth watching.
The fracturing simulations are absolutely amazing, and so are the fire and burning simulations.
I’m a bit less impressed by the boat simulation though, you see lots of dents on the water after the boat pasts, and the dents just stay there and not changing much, this is a bit unrealistic.
There is info on that page that this Ron Fedkiw guy has published over 80 research papers about computational physics etc. These kind of papers are essential when developing these features into programs. I don’t know how to get hold of that kind of papers in general thou.
Also there might be some features missing from Blender that are required to get some certain effect… like true volumetrics for smoke and fire etc. so the coder should do at least those two if they wanted to implement that.
Couldn’t resist this one time 
