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YouTuber bet a physicist $10,000 that a wind-powered vehicle could travel twice as fast as the wind
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/youtuber-won-10000-bet-with-physicist-over-wind-powered-vehicle-2021-7
A popular YouTuber filmed himself driving a wind-powered vehicle downwind faster than the wind itself.
A UCLA professor bet $US10,000 ($AU13,580) that the video was wrong, saying it broke the laws of physics.
Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson oversaw the bet. In the end, the professor conceded and paid up.
Created by Rick Cavallaro, a former aerospace engineer, Blackbird is unique because it can move directly downwind faster than the wind itself for a sustained period. Any sailor worth their salt can tell you that a boat can do that by cutting zigzag patterns; that’s called tacking. But the idea that a vehicle can beat the breeze traveling straight downwind, no tacking involved, is controversial.
“I knew this was a counterintuitive problem. To be perfectly honest with you, when I went out to pilot the craft, I didn’t understand how it worked,” Muller told Insider.
Blackbird is so counterintuitive, in fact, that less than a week after Muller released his video (below), Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics at UCLA, emailed to inform him that it had to be wrong. A vehicle like that would break the laws of physics, Kusenko said.
A popular YouTuber filmed himself driving a wind-powered vehicle downwind faster than the wind itself.
A UCLA professor bet $US10,000 ($AU13,580) that the video was wrong, saying it broke the laws of physics.
Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson oversaw the bet. In the end, the professor conceded and paid up.
Created by Rick Cavallaro, a former aerospace engineer, Blackbird is unique because it can move directly downwind faster than the wind itself for a sustained period. Any sailor worth their salt can tell you that a boat can do that by cutting zigzag patterns; that’s called tacking. But the idea that a vehicle can beat the breeze traveling straight downwind, no tacking involved, is controversial.
“I knew this was a counterintuitive problem. To be perfectly honest with you, when I went out to pilot the craft, I didn’t understand how it worked,” Muller told Insider.
Blackbird is so counterintuitive, in fact, that less than a week after Muller released his video (below), Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics at UCLA, emailed to inform him that it had to be wrong. A vehicle like that would break the laws of physics, Kusenko said.
Link to tweet
Very interesting stuff. I love it when people challenge long held beliefs and defy skeptics like this. More at the link.
2 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Spock, what do you think?
At least the scientists paid up, didn’t they? 