The bicycle and bumblebee are both examples of where someone thought they had an explanation, but that explanation was wrong, and the true explanation has since been discovered (or possibly, was known even before the false one was). An airplane with the measurements of a bumblebee wouldn’t be able to fly, but all that means is that bumblebees don’t fly in the same way that airplanes do (and why would we expect that they would?). Likewise, the gyroscopic forces in the wheels of a bicycle aren’t enough to keep it upright, but that just means that there’s another effect doing so instead. In both cases, the real explanations are known, and they work just fine.
Someone asked on the previous page what dark energy is. To the best of our knowledge, it’s a fluid with negative pressure of the same magnitude as its energy density, which is uniformly distributed through the Universe, and which makes up about 70% of the total energy density of the Universe. And that’s all we know.
One that has surprised me is that scientists don’t know why we need to sleep. Study has shown sleep serves several functions, but it’s still mysterious.
I don’t know about new developments in this regard, but science is always or nearly always incremental. And Some of the things we think we know are wrong. Nature of the beast.
of course, what holds a bicycle up is a human balancing on it. We can do it on a unicycle or if you are good, with enough training, on the end of a long thin pole. The question that got picked up by people looking for miraculousness ( if that is a word) was why does a modern bike style work so much better than the old big front wheel things whatever they were called. There are probably a bunch of interacting engineering principles that we can continue refining and better understanding nearly infinitely. But it does not mean there is something miraculous going on or some forever indecipherable question specific to two-wheeled conveyance.
There’s plenty of things that actually happened or will happen that science could IN PRINCIPLE never explain.
For example…
Say I take a piece of paper and write something on it. Then I burn the piece of paper. Then I kill myself. No one saw any of this happen and it was not video recorded.
Could any amount of science, in principle, ever reveal what was once written on that paper? I say no.
Most bicycles will maintain and return to balance without rider input, or even a rider, within a speed range that varies according to many factors. You are correct that a skillful enough rider can balance on even a poorly designed, massively unstable machine, but ordinary bicycles require very little of the rider…mostly they just have to learn to relax and stop upsetting the machine’s natural dynamic stability.
In fact, it really isn’t possible to design a really good handling bicycle through scientific or engineering analysis. There is still no replacement for trial and error, though much T&E has matured into rules-of-thumb that will nearly always result in decently rideable traditional design bikes in average sizes…even if they don’t handle just the way the designer was intending. With experience, bicycle designers develop a sense of what works well…but if you are very tall, you want a designer with experience designing tall bikes, not just normal bikes, and you probably don’t want a designer’s first tandem or recumbent design either.
A partial list of variables that influence stability: Frame stiffness, fork rake, heat tube angle, rider weight and weight distribution, handle bar position. Even if we could get a handle on all the mechanical variables and how they interact, (which we haven’t) we still have to deal with the influence of the rider, and nobody has come up with anything approaching a useful model of that. When we depart from traditional sizes or traditional designs several iterations of trial and error are typically required to get a nice handling machine, some may not even be safely rideable.
About the best that has been done is to qualify the effect of changing a single variable when all the others are held constant and within “normal” ranges. How they interact, and how you might compensate for one far outside the normal range is only determined experimentally.
Those interested will find a good discussion of competing theories of bicycle stability in this book. Be sure to get the third or later edition though. It replaced much of the stability discussion of earlier editions that was found to be quite wrong.
One way of thinking about the OP is to say that science cannot explain anything, really. Science describes what it observes, but ultimately, when the question of “why” keeps coming up, the answer comes down to, “that’s just the way the universe seems to work.”
Sleep. People have been studying if for decades and they still don’t know why we do it or why things go down hill rapidly if we go without for more then a day or so. Dreams are another mystery, the current theory involves your brain sorting out the information it’s taken in during the day but that doesn’t explain stuff like flying dreams, or my brother’s re-occurring dream of fighting a bear on the lawn.
You’re supposed to know what they want by telepathy, without having to ask or their having to say anything. And if you don’t, it shows how selfish and uncaring you are.
“Ever” is a might big word, in this context. It wasn’t that long ago when it would have been considered impossible for people around the world to communicate the way we are, right now.
Wrong. Try just off the west coast of Australia, nowhere near the Marianas. Try it with this link.
Wrong. It stores and concentrates bile. The liver produces it continuously, but you only use it in digestion when there’s actually something there to use it on. The gall bladder releases it as needed. You could have found that in Wikipedia.
The rest of your post was no better. As others pointed out.
where to begin?
Re: Marianas Trench - the Puerto Rico trench, which may or may not be considered as ‘officially’ part of the Bermuda Triangle, is opposite the Marianas. A rare cite: http://www.vindaugagallery.com/archives/391
another: Japan's Dragon's Triangle
Of course, whiny nit-pickers love to say ‘you said ‘exactly’’. It’s not ‘exactly’ opposite’. These are the same kind of people who criticize NASA for saying an asteroid will make a near-miss of Earth, when it passes a few thousand miles away. Pay them no mind. Or, if you wanna get on board with them, ignore the fact that in space terms, a few thousand miles is a near miss. These people love to nitpick on details, and refuse to see a big picture. So down to a few feet, I concede the ‘antipodal’ measurement is not down to the foot. It’s a few miles off - and so what?
‘Ah’, but the nitpickers say, ‘these websites you cite from are not accepted general mass-media sources - therefore, the authors just made the whole thing up’.
Ok, also here: Bermuda Triangle | HISTORY
Also convenient to overlook is that Earth is not a perfect sphere. On a globe, if you follow along on the equator, dig straight thru, and expect to come out exactly opposite where you plotted, you won’t because of the properties of not being exactly spherical. It must be a huge disappointment & hard to compute for some people that most things in nature are not perfect. But, I suppose it’s easier and more fun to pick apart something that someone else posts, rather than to come up with something on their own.
Re: gall bladder - commenting that it produces bile in no way negates what I said - the liver also produces bile. As is well known in the medical community, the gall bladder is not needed for normal life, nor even normal digestion. But, since there’ll be the inevitable cry of the Nitpicker, ‘Cite’:
there are many more - I couldn’t find any that says you need a gallbladder to live - would love to if someone posts.
It takes an incredibly lazy personality to bitch about someone’s claims, without 1st doing research to back it up. Oh yeah, WebMd and Mayo Clinic: they sound very shifty & questionable, how do we know we can trust them? [/sarcasm]
As for the rest of my posts, nothing has been negated. As previously stated, there is no proof of ancients using primitive tools to move the Easter Island statues, and the fact that the moon has been found to have a solid core doesn’t contradict what I said: I said, it pings *like *it’s hollow. Everyone knows it has a core; the whole idea of the mystery is why it pings. But again, that testimony only comes from astronauts who were there, and they’re generally a shifty bunch as well. [/sarcasm].
In short, the nitpicking of the claims I put forth are sloppy, misinterpretive of what was written, and poorly researched. But the rest of the negative critical posts…not so good either.
well, if there are any thoughtful, non-personal-attack type of answers to the original 10 mysteries, I for one would love to see em. So far, organized science hasn’t provided answers, but if someone has access to non-mainstream journals or recent events, it’d be great. An example would be, ‘Here’s what James Cameron learned from his trip down to the bottom of Deepwater Channel’ or ‘a recent article in the Journal of Gastroenterology provides a hypothesis for a need for gallbladders’. NOT, ‘you’re just wrong and refuse to believe it’. This is a grownup discussion board, let’s leave the schoolyard antics back in the past. I for one read & post to learn & educate.
