Something deeply silly about this “we don’t know how aerodynamic lift works” article doing the rounds. Mystery is not in the phenomenon but in people’s weird expectations of what “explanations” ought to be able to accomplish. Cc
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this might make a good case for a sequel to your Bohr atom thing. More accessible too.
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New career: for a fee I will write a pop-sci article "Here's why we don't understand X", where X is any generic well-understood phenomenon that you want to clickbait people about.
Will reduce everything to the cosmological constant problem if necessary.
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You're on... come back to ribbonfarm and write a regular column along those lines :D
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New headline: People who have not studied a specific application of physics have bad intuitions about those physics as compared to experts that have studied and fully understand these physics to a predictive degree
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That’s not what I mean. It’s actually a well written pop science/philosophy of science article of its genre. The silliness is broader, in general culture around scientific explanations.
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well you know what they say, "It's easy to explain how a rocket works, but explaining how a wing works takes a rocket scientist"
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I had a professor who was very adamantly on the vortex side of this 'debate' and never let us forget it
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I think lift, light (wave-particle duality), quantum mechanics (superposition, entanglement), many drugs, and artificial neural networks have in common that we can make them useful without understanding them.
Technically, we don't know how a transistor works (ref. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_fi, which are quantum to say the least).
And that's what separates engineers from scientists. Engineers don't care about a complete explanation; we just aggressively trial and error to build what works.
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