Joseph Gwinn wrote:
In article ,
Richard J Kinch wrote:


MikeMandaville writes:


You see, according to the science of aerodynamics, a bumblebee should not
be able to fly.

Sez who?

http://tafkac.org/faq2k/science_47.html


Website is wrong. The story about the flightless bumblebees is not an
urban legend, or a bit of science-bashing.

My Father, an aeronautical engineer, knew the story first-hand. There
really was a fellow who got his PhD by "proving" that bumblebees cannot
fly, using the best aeronautical theory of the day (the 1930s or 1940s).

The point of the thesis was that the "best aeronautical theory of the
day" didn't work for bumblebees. Not that the bumblebees minded.

Back in the 1940s, severe approximations had to be made, to yield
equations that could be solved by hand (by a room full of people using
mechanical calculating machines). It worked for quite well for
aeroplanes and helicopters, and reasonably well for birds, but not at
all for insects. It's only recently, with the advent of computational
fluid dynamics, that adequate theories of insect flight have emerged.

Joe Gwinn
In the 40's ? - How about the 60's! and early 70's. Not until computers
and calculators were able and willing to go above a slide rule ability.

We always did approximations and had some basic rules that allowed truncation
or adding another variable ...

Martin [ who was in the workplace for several years when he bought a $600 4 banger
with memory, 12 digits and up to 4 of them below the decimal. I did log and trig
by approximation routines. Some of which came out in EDN or Electronics during the time.

Then TI and HP began to make calculators.

Martin

--
Martin Eastburn
@ home at Lion's Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net
NRA LOH, NRA Life
NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder

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