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The Fly With Me podcast had a great episode where they tried to get to the bottom of how a wing really generates lift. http://joepodcaster.libsyn.com/fly-with-

by quux 16y ago

The Fly With Me podcast had a great episode where they tried to get to the bottom of how a wing really generates lift. http://joepodcaster.libsyn.com/fly-with-me-episode-25 http://joepodcaster.libsyn.com/fly-with-me-episode-25 The host is an airline pilot and he brought in a science podcaster to help him interview a professor of aeronautical engineering. Things went pretty smoothly until the professor started talking about in ring integrals and circular flows of air around the entire wing forcing the interviewers to give up and say "Look, it's really complicated." They put the whole unedited explanation at the end of the podcast for anyone crazy enough to listen to it. :) The bottom line was that there are 3 things going on at the same time, Bernouilli, Newtonian action/reaction, and the Conada effect (I think, this is where he started talking about ring integrals and blowing everyone's minds). The problem is that even the experts can't say which of those is the principle reason for lift, and which ones are actually side effects from the "real reason." Fortunately the math doesn't care and works anyway, so they can still design and model airfoils very well.

wbeaty 16y ago
Hilarious! This is the usual problem with rigorous physics/engineering: we don't understand it ourselves, and rather than being honest about it, we quote math at you. It's like doctors in 1700 falling back to Latin in order to hide their embarrassing ignorance from the public. In reality, "If you can't explain it to your grandmother, then you don't understand it yourself." (A. Einstein.) Similarly, if you asked me some eletronics questions about a piece of complicated circuitry that I didn't understand, I could baffle you with BS. It's simple, I just pull out the equations from the SPICE component models. (As if owning the printout of the software can tell us anything about the behavior of the simulated circuit!!) So, whenever you see an expert pull this crap, give them the above Einstein quote.

by quux 16y ago

wbeaty 16y ago

Hilarious! This is the usual problem with rigorous physics/engineering: we don't understand it ourselves, and rather than being honest about it, we quote math at you. It's like doctors in 1700 falling back to Latin in order to hide their embarrassing ignorance from the public. In reality, "If you can't explain it to your grandmother, then you don't understand it yourself." (A. Einstein.) Similarly, if you asked me some eletronics questions about a piece of complicated circuitry that I didn't understand, I could baffle you with BS. It's simple, I just pull out the equations from the SPICE component models. (As if owning the printout of the software can tell us anything about the behavior of the simulated circuit!!) So, whenever you see an expert pull this crap, give them the above Einstein quote.