A debate simmered in certain obscure quarters a couple of years ago over the relative merits of the Newton and Bernoulli explanations of lift, even though they're just two sides of the same coin. An airplane produces many kinds of disturbances in the air as it passes by, and you can argue all day about causes and effects; but lift and drag ultimately boil down to what the airplane feels—that is, to the forces applied directly to its surface. Everything would become clear if we could just be airplanes for a little while, and feel on our skin the push here and the tug there whose end result is the miraculous levitation of thousands of pounds of deadweight.
展开▼