Insights How Does an Airplane Wing Work: a Primer on Lift - Comments

[boneh3ad]

Sure, but one of the most important things to learn as a researcher and educator is to know your audience. No matter how beautiful or complete the theory, it is useless if your target audience does not understand it.

 

[Robert M]

Sure, but one of the most important things to learn as a researcher and educator is to k ow your audience. No matter how beautiful or complete the theory, it is useless if your target audience does not understand it.

Your audience included me. I didn't write an article. I made a comment. The idea that truth (or whatever you choose to call it) should depend on an audience's tolerance for detail or for being told that the necessary detail may be beyond any likely audience, is--in my opinion--dangerous.

The mathematical theory of lift is solid, but you need some advanced tools that many learn in elementary electricity and magnetism. If vorticity and circulation are beyond an audience, then so are the Biot-Savart Law and electric currents as a source of the magnetic field.

 

[boneh3ad]

I didn't say they were beyond any audience. I said they were beyond a large chunk of the target audience. The purpose was a brief introduction to lift and to sort of quell a very common argument that erupts on this site about lift. The purpose was not to lay out a complete mathematical description of aerodynamic forces. The present article serves it's intended purpose. Feel free to write a more complete Insight on lift if you desire, but that wasn't the point here. A line had to be drawn somewhere for a short article.