Ivan Shukster wrote: >I remember reading that the bubble bee example was done at a party on a >napkin and the next day the person who showed that bees cannot fly came back >and said that he forgot to include something in the calculation.
The bumblebee flight issue is really not that anyone ever proved that they *can't* fly, just that they can't determine the exact mechanism of *how* they fly: Bees not only move their wings to fly, they constantly change the angle of attack of the wing and, most problematic, the *shape* of the wing. The number of possible permutations of all these variables just makes it impossible for even the most powerful supercomputer to work with all the data. As the story passed from one person to another it morphed into the pithy but inaccurate notion that scientists have "proven" that bumblebees can't fly. -- Mark Roberts Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.com 412-687-2835 -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
