Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
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Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
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Re: Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
#2Note: The author is not entirely serious. It's part of a series called Mystifications: A short series of semi-satirical pop science articles, called "Here's why we don't understand". The science presented is mostly accurate. The first article was "we don’t understand electricity" and now it's "we don’t understand flight". You'll find the articles more enjoyable if you think of it as a thought experiment about the depth of knowledge - the author is a physics professor and he clearly knows what he's talking about.
Re: Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
#3Note: The author is not entirely serious. It's part of a series called Mystifications: A short series of semi-satirical pop science articles, called "Here's why we don't understand". The science presented is mostly accurate. The first article was "we don’t understand electricity" and now it's "we don’t understand flight". You'll find the articles more enjoyable if you think of it as a thought experiment about the dep…
In this case I took it to be poking some fun at the two conflicting 'intuitive' explanations for a wing producing lift: one being that air strikes the bottom of the wing as it moves forward, pushing upward on it, and the other being that air moves faster under the flat underside of the wing than over the curved upper side, causing a pressure differential. Of course reality is more complex than either simple answer, and the real answer is something more like, "The wing behaves approximately as described by this equation."
Re: Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
#4Note: The author is not entirely serious. It's part of a series called Mystifications: A short series of semi-satirical pop science articles, called "Here's why we don't understand". The science presented is mostly accurate. The first article was "we don’t understand electricity" and now it's "we don’t understand flight". You'll find the articles more enjoyable if you think of it as a thought experiment about the dep…
In this case I took it to be poking some fun at the two conflicting 'intuitive' explanations for a wing producing lift: one being that air strikes the bottom of the wing as it moves forward, pushing upward on it, and the other being that air moves faster under the flat underside of the wing than over the curved upper side, causing a pressure differential. Of course reality is more complex than either simple answer, a…
Air moves faster on the upper side, creating a pressure differential.
Re: Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
#5Note: The author is not entirely serious. It's part of a series called Mystifications: A short series of semi-satirical pop science articles, called "Here's why we don't understand". The science presented is mostly accurate. The first article was "we don’t understand electricity" and now it's "we don’t understand flight". You'll find the articles more enjoyable if you think of it as a thought experiment about the dep…
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Re: Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
#6Note: The author is not entirely serious. It's part of a series called Mystifications: A short series of semi-satirical pop science articles, called "Here's why we don't understand". The science presented is mostly accurate. The first article was "we don’t understand electricity" and now it's "we don’t understand flight". You'll find the articles more enjoyable if you think of it as a thought experiment about the dep…
Hm, I was hoping this article would explain in what sense we don't understand flight, or in what sense people think we don't understand flight, but it didn't seem to answer that question...
Re: Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
#7The continued assertion that "we don't understand heavier-than-air flight" is a weird one. The article even skates around this, saying (essentially) "well maybe we do understand it, but chaos theory!"
If you're in the sky and you want to stay there, you have to counteract gravity. Heavier-than-air flight does this by pushing down on air. Want to stay in the sky? Push down on enough air, fast enough, and you will stay in the sky.
Since air is a fluid, pushing down on air is equivalent to pushing air down. The lift a plane or helicopter generates is directly proportional to the amount of air it pushes down (and to a varying degree how much engine exhaust it pushes down). That is, we need something to divert air downwards and something to push us through that air. The better we can redirect air downwards, and push ourselves through the air, the easier it is to fly.
We have found many shapes that are very good at passively redirecting air when pushed through the air, we have developed engines that are good at pushing us through the air, and we have developed structures that are able to hold everything together while being light. That is why heavier-than-air flight is possible, and it's very well understood.
If anything, our understanding of why certain shapes redirect air so well is lacking, but even then not really. Experiments and modelling are really good at finding the conditions under which air stops being redirected efficiently. If we try to parameterise this airflow, and reduce it to simple equations, well maybe then the effect is not well explained. Statements like "the air moves faster on the top than on the bottom, so there is a pressure differential and hence a lifting force" may be true even if misleading, and statements like "the air moves faster on top because it is longer than the bottom side" are definitely misleading and incorrect, but just because these statements exist and some people believe them does not mean we don't understand heavier-than-air flight! Such flight is possible because we are able to push down on air with enough force to keep us flying, and so much of how that works is well understood.
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To try and say something directed more at the point the article seems to be making: confusion or misunderstanding about the technical details, or modelling, of something is very different to not understanding how that thing works.
We understand heavier-than-air flight in the exact same way we understand sailing - redirect airflow to generate a force for your own purpose - but you don't see articles about how we don't understand how sailing works.
Re: Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
#8Seems like rockets and bullets somehow don't count as being heavier-than-air flight. Maybe they should say we don't understand aerodynamic lift?
Re: Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
#9Note: The author is not entirely serious. It's part of a series called Mystifications: A short series of semi-satirical pop science articles, called "Here's why we don't understand". The science presented is mostly accurate. The first article was "we don’t understand electricity" and now it's "we don’t understand flight". You'll find the articles more enjoyable if you think of it as a thought experiment about the dep…
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Though I don't know what idea he was referring to, tides can be pretty hard to predict accurately. Obviously nothing to do with God, but it's probably fair to say there are aspects of them we don't understand or at least can't simulate arbitrarily far into the future.
"In an analysis of the tides in Venice Lagoon, at the head of the Adriatic Sea, where the tides seem to pick up because of near-resonancy of the basin, Vittori (1992) observed that consecutive tidal maxima are highly irregular. She argued this to be indicative of low-dimensional chaos. Whether the low-order dynamics to which this is due is either inherited from the dynamics of the local wind fields or of a genuinely oceanographic nature is not clear." [1]
[1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/phoc/32/3/1520-04...
Re: Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
#10Seems like rockets and bullets somehow don't count as being heavier-than-air flight. Maybe they should say we don't understand aerodynamic lift?
rockets and bullets don't fly. They [free]fall.