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I upvoted this, because I think the fundamental thesis is right: most of the time, for physical phenomena, there is a wrong-but-close approximate explanation th

I upvoted this, because I think the fundamental thesis is right: most of the time, for physical phenomena, there is a wrong-but-close approximate explanation that is within the understanding of someone with high-school science, or at least within intuitive grasp thereof. This is the basis of popular science. The errors with the approximation reduce as you apply better models, and those models are the domain of practitioners. The question of why airfoils generate lift seems to be resistant to the popular science technique. The first useful approximations all require calculus and are the result of whole-system effects at a macro-level. So all the explanations you can get to from high-school science are contradicted by real-world experience.

wbeaty 5y ago
"There is no gravity in outer space. Gravity ends at the top of Earth's atmosphere. That's why astronauts in the ISS are weightless." Simple and concise. Easily understood by little kids. Textbooks in the 1950s actually taught this "fact." What could be the problem? It's not "simplified," instead IT'S WRONG... ...and it creates a massive physics-misconception, where if a student actually believed it, later they'd have enormous trouble in physics classes. (Also, if they later became a teacher, then they'd give all their students the same destructive misconception. If later they became a textbook author for K6 grades, millions of students would become infected! Heh, education is a viral effect: a meme-spreading process, and "mental diseases" like the above are common.)