Every time I hear that bees shouldn’t be able to fly “based on the laws of aviation”, I die a little inside. You want to know why?
Because they don’t fly using the laws of aviation. (I don’t even know what these “laws of aviation” are. FAA regulations?)
The short, not entirely accurate explanation is: bees are so small that, at the speeds they are flying, physics makes the air behave more like water or honey than the almost imperceptible gas we’re used to. You need to fly in a much different way than an airplane if you’re in a material like that—you’re basically swimming, not gliding.
The longer, more accurate explanation will take us a bit. There are a lot of physical concepts that we’ll need to pull in to actually dismantle this catchy, insidious phrase.
Here are the first two we’ll need:
Concept 1: Air is made up of molecules. It feels like it’s empty space, but really it’s tiny paired atoms of oxygen and nitrogen and other gases bumping around—that’s what you’re feeling when there’s a strong wind.
These molecules experience similar physics to you and I, the most relevant principles for now being:
- Inertia: an object at rest stays at rest, or an object in motion stays in motion, unless acted upon by an external force
- Friction: the “resistance” force of the world, like the one you feel when you try to push a heavy box on carpet
Concept 2: In the world of aerodynamics, we consider air to be a fluid, like water. This probably sounds weird, but it’s true.
Air is made of different elements and is an entirely different state of matter, but the same physical laws that describe how water moves also describe air flow. If you were able to turn a gust of wind bright pink and see how it blows through a forest, you’d see it act surprisingly similar to water moving around rocks in a river!
Tomorrow: how air being a fluid relates to it also being molecules.