3 ms·
> But the take-away from Icarus seems to be about hubris No, the take-away from Icarus is that wax is a shitty adhesive. The rest is good points though.
by a1369209993 11y ago
> But the take-away from Icarus seems to be about hubris
No, the take-away from Icarus is that wax is a shitty adhesive.
The rest is good points though.
- batou 11y agoI came up with the same answer many years ago at school. I was told I'd make a good engineer but a bad philosopher by my teacher :)
- logicallee 11y agoHaha, that's hilarious. Teacher: "Write a report on the story of Icarus. What lessons can we learn?" Then you write up a report like a post-mortem of a failed rocket launch. Materials science, testing, dry runs, abort procedure. A graph of wax temperature versus sheer strength, tensile strength. Altitude versus temperature graph. Temperature versus phase diagram for wax. Finally conclude that besides lack of a suitable abort procedure the major error was in choosing a midday launch, dusk should have been chosen in order to reduce incident light, which would have kept the temperature within design constraints for the altitudes Icarus was flying. Until more suitable materials were found, the Greeks should stick to night-time launches.