Directly Downwind Faster Than the Wind Revisited.

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Veritasium is a YouTube science and math channel with almost 9 million subscribers. He gets it. He even got to pilot the Blackbird. You will have to watch the video yourself if he too was able to sail in a vehicle powered only by the wind that moved directly downwind faster than the wind that was blowing it.

 

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It would have been a great Mythbusters segment

 

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It would have been a great Mythbusters segment

spork tried to get Mythbusters to take this on. They used to have a forum and that was where I was first introduced to this concept. I opposed the idea rather strongly at first but every time that spork (aka Rick Cavalero) made a basic claim about aerodynamics he was correct and I was wrong. I may be opinionated, but I am not afraid to check out my own claims and admit that I was wrong when I was shown to be. When he made his video of a small cart on a treadmill I knew that he was right and admitted it. He was exceptionally gracious in accepting my admission that I was wrong. No gloating. I still hear from him now and then, but I missed this. There is a website where it used to be debated hot and heavy but I have not been there for months. If I had been there I would have known that this was coming.

 

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The plot thickens. The maker of the video just bet UCLA physics professor Alexander Kusenko that this is real. Three people witnessed the $10,000 bet. They were Sean Carroll, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye.

 

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Another write up and a bit more detail about the bet:

VICE - VICE is the definitive guide to enlightening information.

One note, in that article Kusenko repeats his claim that he has no problem making such a bet, yet he turned down Cavaliers when he offered the same wager. Perhaps he sees the light.

And of course Vice screwed up the explanation of how the cart works.

 

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One more note in regards to the bet. Kusenko failed. He was shown to be wrong, by various means. He did admit that he lost the bet. And Muller was more than gracious in his victory. But Kusenko tried to claim that the lost on a technicality and was still correct, even though all of his demands for specific types of evidence were given to him and his own explanations appear have been mere handwaving, along with some serious errors. Ah well, I used to debate against this too and understand how extremely counterintuitive the idea is.

I have a feeling that Kusenko knows that he is wrong but just cannot figure out why. He was possibly getting pressured by colleagues that understood this to conceded. He did, but not in a manner consistent with the ideals that scientists are supposed to follow.

 

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One more point, after Kusenko gave his rather mealy mouthed and false admission that he was wrong (he still wanted to claim that it did not work even though his arguments were all met with and refuted and he had only a hand waving explanation that he did not even propose testing) he deleted all of his Tweets in that feed. That is never a good thing for a scientist to do. Part of the scientific method is to publish ones work.

 

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An update. Yes, Kusenko did pay his ten thousand dollars. He has yet to fully admit that he is wrong. Muller made another video where he explains more thoroughly how this works. He also overcomes the one seemingly valid claim of Kusenko in his mathematical opposition to the cart. There was an equation that had a divide by zero error in it at wind speed making it look as if the cart would get infinite energy. The problem was that the equation was a simplification. There is a more complex equation that one would use at wind speed as explained by Mark Drela of MIT. That equation is used at other speeds because it is accurate enough. Think of when one uses Relativity versus Newtonian physics. At any rate here is the latest video with appearances by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Mark Drela and others: