Does the Common Bee Break the Laws of Physics

I have heard it said (not very often, mind you) that every Bee in the world currently beating it's wings is defying the laws of physics as we speak. The argument genuinly tends to go along the lines of "if you factor in the weight of a Bee, the surface area of the Bee's wings, and the power available to the Bee from it's flight muscles, the number needed comes up short, and so Bee's should not be able to fly. This has been used as an argument, not neccessarily to bolster a religious belief, but rather, as an argument attempting to make one doubt the abilities of science to provide a complete description of the natural world. After all, what on earth could science possibly know on the origins of the universe, the origins of life, how gravity works, and why the life we observe is so diverse and complex, if it can't even explain the flight of a bee.

I think the argument needs some different, perhaps not as catchy, wording, however. Clearly flying bees don't break the laws of physics, they are clearly able to fly, this can be verified in any number of ways, but I feel that that won't be neccessary.  Let's try this: the clear fact that Bees can fly is a natural phenominon that cannot be explained by the current best mathmatical representations of the laws of physics that our best and brightest have been able to prove through objective observation, independant experimentation and vindicated predictions. Boy, that was a mouthfull. But, is this claim true? Is science unable to account for the flight of a Bee? The short answer is, unsuprisingly, no. This argument is completely unsubstantiated, and hasn't been close to valid for decades. And for the long answer, I will tell you why.

You see, when you actually do the equation that I mentioned above, factor in weight, wing span and muscle power, the argument is actually correct in a sense, according to the numbers, the Bee should not be able to fly. However, the predicted accuracy of this equation comes from a very much outdated understanding of aerodynamics, fluid mechanics and flight in general. The alleged origin of this idea was more than 80 years ago, when a biologist and an aerodynamicist got to chatting about insect flight. The aerodynamicist did some calulations and came to conclusion that a Bee did not generate enough lift to be able to fly. However, this potentially revolutionary discovery in the world of biology was debunked by the very same aerodynamicist who came up with the faulty discovery in the first place, some say within hours. The problem was a faulty analogy between the flight of Bees, and the flight of planes. He used the same formula to calculate both. If planes were built the way Bees are, planes would not take off.

The trouble is however that Bees are not like planes, they are like helicopters. A moving airfoil, such as a helicopter blade, or the beating of a Bees wing, creates much more lift than the stationary one you would find on planes. The problem with Bees was not an aerodynamical one, but a mechanical one, namely, just how is it that Bees are able to generate the imcomprehensable speed that their wings beat at: the wings of a Bee beat roughly 200 times a second (if you want the math, it's 12000 times a minute, 720,000 times an hour, 17.3 million times a day, 518 million times a month, 6.22 billion times a year, and (very approximately) 31 billion times in a Bees lifetime. So how do Bees flap those wings so darn fast? The trick is that the Bee's thorax muscles don't expand and contract, so much as they vibrate. These vibrations are caused by nerve impulses that give the muscles a sort of "twang" until the next impulse hits, and so on until everyone is dead.

So, it isn't hard to deduce that the Bee argument just does not come close to holding up, it's been debunked for more than 80 years, but I guess that doesn't stop people jumping on the train without taking the time to notice that the train has passed all it's stops and his careening towards a cliff. Happy Christmas

A December Night's Chill

Well, it certainly had been coming. Manchester United have had a lot of what has transpired over the last few weeks, coming. But even still, a group stage exit from a group that Alex Ferguson might have hand picked himself, is one of the bitterest pills that the United faithful will have ever had to swallow, perhaps topping even the thrashing that Manchester City dished out on United’s own patch. The events of Wednesday night, like the events at Old Trafford, will live very long in the memory of every United fan, much as 2009’s catastrophic 4-1 Old Trafford defeat against Liverpool still sticks in my mind and I’m sure many others.

These are hardly revelatory truths of course. But the gravity of what has transpired in the last month at Manchester United F.C. cannot be overstated. Humiliated by their neighbours, out of the Champions League, all endured by a United team that has been playing poorly, scraping wins through their only source of goals recently, Javier Hernandez, now injured for at least a month. Most of the United faithful realise that this is a team in transition, that for all the rainy days thus far, both domestically and in Europe, they have accumulated more points than they had this time last season.

 United have endured many transitional periods under Alex Ferguson, and have gone on to great triumphs after every one. No, it is not the thought of consistent decline that is sending a chill down the spine of United’s fan base, nor indeed is it the cold December weather. Nor is it the thought of City becoming the dominant force in English football, though, a force to be reckoned with, they certainly are, but that isn’t what’s vexing this United fan.

 No, what I feel is the biggest cause for concern at the moment is, as I perceive it, the fact that over the last few weeks United seem to have lost that which they had in spades last season. For all their poor away form, for all their scrappy wins, and for all the times that they didn’t play the way United are expected to play last season, they always had one thing that was without question: they had spirit. They had hunger. They had desire, they had passion, they had determination, they had the mindset that, no matter what happens, no matter what the opposition, the circumstance, the obstacles in their way, that no matter what, they would find a way to win, be it putting 7 past Blackburn in the early stages of last season, or digging in and grinding out a result as they did on many occasions, they would get the job done. Recently though, from where I stand, that fortitude, that resiliency has been nowhere to be seen thus far.

They’ve been surviving, they’ve been grinding out wins, relying on Hernandez for goals, but on Wednesday night, when the chips were down, the cards were dealt, and they needed a big dose of that United spirit… it was nowhere to be seen. The 11 man phalanx that stood up to so much punishment last season… twice had tactically suspect holes in it punished by the swiss hosts. That defiant, deafening roar of the defending English champions and champions league runners up… was no more than a half hearted squeak in the face of the Swiss champions.

 The signs were their for all to see against crystal palace, but given that it was a side comprised largely of back up players and future prospects, the benefit of the doubt was given without hesitation. But against Basel… Ferdinand, Vidic, Rooney and co. were all found wanting, and were all found not wanting enough. January is just around the corner, and as has been pointed out by every football watcher and their grandmothers, Manchester United desperately need an injection of talent in the midfield. But even that isn’t enough now. Because Manchester United have an infection on the inside, that one or two key signings aren’t going to be able to change.

And every United fan will be hoping that Dr. Ferguson can prescribe the right medicine, as he has done so often before. But at Manchester united, premier league trophies, challenging for the FA and carling cup, and in Europe, these things are not considered the marks of a good season, but as absolutely mandatory, so spoiled has United’s fan base been for the last 20 years. And as he watched his side slump to defeat in Switzerland, even the wily godfather of Old Trafford will be struggling not to baulk at the task before him, realising, as he must, that United are further off the pace of Barcelona than they were on that fateful night in may, when Pep Guardiola‘s magnificent team coolly outclassed the English champions. And Ferguson will also know that United‘s stature as Englands perennial top offering is under heavy threat from City, heavier than the threats that Arsenal and Chelsea have provided in the last decade. Alex Ferguson will have felt much more than a December night’s chill crawling down his spine, as he heard that famous champions league anthem slowly fading to black in his mind, and the reality of Europa league football loomed, and Ferguson, as he was forced to turn his attentions back to United’s domestic campaign, will push to the furthest recesses of his mind the very thought of spending his spring weekdays sitting on the substitute bench of European football.

Pointless Rambling

It's probably poor etiquette to post two blogs in the same day, indeed the same session at my local Starbucks, but I suppose it will make up for my lengthy absence. I honestly don't have a particular topic in mind to talk about, but I do enjoy letting my mind meander from time to time on different things. Maybe I'll post what I write, maybe I won't, that was largely the point of this blog to begin with. In any event, I happened to see Stephen Hawking's hour long presentation on the subject: "Did God Create the Universe". Given that I am currently staying under the roof of my heavily creationist Grandparents, and given that my granddad decided to watch it with me, I feel I could perhaps be forgiven for being more than a little apprehensive about what would follow in the next 60 minutes. I found myself pleasantly surprised however, Hawking did a fine job, without being too controversial, or so it seemed to me. The first half of the show was spent talking about the history of the conflict between science and religion. Needless to say, Galileo was mentioned as he always is (with good reason, mind you). Once the second half got started however, Hawking's proverbial gloves were off, and he got down to some fairly difficult to grasp physics, for the layman certainly, he didn't go into quite as much detail as I would have liked, but more than I was expecting certainly. It is Hawking's view that God could not have created the Universe, for the simple reason that time came into existence at the time of the big bang, a fairly uncontroversial viewpoint, (unless you are a creationist, of courser) and thus, there was no time available for any deity to do any creating of any kind. His reasoning is hard to fault, but I wouldn't say it's the most satisfying answer I'll ever hear, particular with "creationist cop-out argument #34": God is outside of time, and is not bound by it (or some such nonsense). Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable watch, it was very well shot, and hawking does a good job of making some of the more incomprehensible aspects of physics slightly easier to digest, through the use of some reasonably clever metaphors. I'm unsure as to whether or not the idea that quantum mechanics can account for the initial singularity at the beginning of the universe is an idea that was first postulated by Hawking, but I know there are others who subscribe to it. One such man is the brilliant theoretical physicist, and one of my personal intellectual heroes, Lawrence Krauss, one of the fathers of the concept of dark matter and energy. Krauss has a new book coming out in the new year called "A Universe from Nothing", which I will definitely be picking up as soon as I can, and would heartily recommend it to anyone remotely interested in the subject; they don't call Krauss "the Woody Allen of physics" for nothing. The book also features a foreword by Christopher Hitchens and an afterword by Richard Dawkins, and personally, I couldn't pick a better dream team. Sadly, my time is short, so I'd better wrap this up. Next blog will probably be my Top 10 TV Shows, so watch out for that, should be up at some point this week.