Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

Imagine two circles in 2D that repel each other the closest you get them together, like magnets do. In 2D it would look like they're interacting at a distance, but maybe in 3D they're two cylinders that are a bit flexible, that are actually touching at the ends, but not in the 2D plane you're observing. The interaction is "properly physical" in 3D but in the 2D plane it seems magical.

That's a way that I imagine it in 2D vs 3D, so this might be similar in 3D vs ND, where N > 3. Of course this is all baseless speculation, but it seems kinda plausible in my head.

Edit: bad drawing of what I meant: https://imgur.com/362tcHg

Everything is being jostled around randomly. The molecules don't have brains or seeker warheads. They can't "decide" to home in on a target.

The only mechanisms for guidance are: diffusion due to concentration gradients, movement of charged molecules due to electric fields, and molecules actually grabbing other molecules.

It's all probabilities. This conformation makes it more likely that this thing will stick to this other thing. You may have heard that genes can be turned on or off. How? DNA is literally wound on molecular spools in your cell nuclei. When the DNA is loosely wound other molecules can bump into it and transcribe it -- the gene is ON. When the DNA is tightly spooled, other molecules can't get in there and the gene is OFF for transcription. There's no binary switch, just likelihoods.

Everything is probabilistic, but the probabilities have been tuned by evolution through natural selection to deliver a system that works well enough.

But to get to the heart of your question: You want to reduce the prop diameter (ground clearance perhaps? The engineer in me asks why you don't just make the landing gear taller) and not change the engine. You don't actually have to add blades (maybe). You could also just make the existing blades fatter, or change the airfoil, or increase the propeller RPM. Lots of ways to attack that.

But, playing along that adding blades is the only way:

1) Take your existing high-wing plane and calculate power required for all phases of flight: Take-off, climb, cruise, etc.

2) Take your new low-wing plane with its smaller prop diameter and work backwards to ensure you can actually meet the power requirements to stay aloft through your envelope. Adding blades reduces efficiency because the blades' wakes interfere with each other so you'll have to dig into some experimental data based on the prop of your choice. Much depends on blade pitch and washout.

Very likely you will need to increase the RPM (if your engine can deliver enough power) or change engines to a more powerful model because your props are now less efficient.

Such is the nature of aircraft design - almost nothing can be changed without affecting something else.

However, even with understanding how a Quantum Computer works at its most basic level I still have difficulty understanding the more useful Quantum Algorithms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm